August's #edtech talk will be by Susan Coulson on student-generated blended digital media for assessment.

Susan will speak about how integrating different media forms provided students with a new approach to learning, presenting and understanding.

Time: 12^th August 2016, 12-1pm
Venue: Room 218, Level 2, Fisher Library South, F04
Register: Click here

In a series of articles in The Chronicle from his book "Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons From the Science of Learning", James M. Lang presents simple and practical ideas ideally suited to try out in lectures. In the fourth article, quick suggestions for making better use of the final minutes of lectures:

1. The minute paper: ask students to write down their thoughts on two questions:
   • What was the most important thing you learned in today's lecture?
   • What are you still unsure about?
   If these answers are entered on the class discussion forum or via a response device, the students answers can be displayed anonymously in the class for discussion.
2. Closing connections: offer students the opportunity to finish the lecture early after they have made a list of 5 ways in which the lecture material relates to contexts outside the lecture theatre.
3. The metacognitive five: after a mid-semester test or quiz, ask students to spend two minutes writing down how they studied. As with (1), this information could also be collected electronically. Before the final exam, make a slide with two columns, showing the approaches used by high and low achieving students and spend 5 minutes talking about study strategies.
4. Close the loop: repeat an activity used in the first 5 minutes of class and discuss how the lecture material has moved their understanding forward.

Teaching@Sydney is changing to a new, more collaborative and interactive format in August. If you have a unikey, you can easily contribute to the new Teaching@Sydney. We invite staff and students from around the University to write about anything related to learning and teaching, in the broad areas of teaching tips, examples of educational excellence, news and updates, and teaching research. If you have an example of innovative teaching, an encouraging story of student engagement, an exciting learning and teaching project you've been working on, an impactful tool or approach that your students are raving about, we'd like you share it with the University via the new Teaching@Sydney.

We hope you have enjoyed receiving the current format in years past, and look forward to working with you to surface great ideas about learning and teaching. Stay tuned for more information in August, and start thinking of things you could share!

Dr Kate Thomson (Faculty of Health Sciences), Dr Jen Scott Curwood (Faculty of Education and Social Work) and Associate Professor Martin Tomitsch (Faculty of Architecture, Design, and Planning) received the Taylor and Francis Prize for the Best Paper by a New Researcher at the Higher Education Research and Development Society of Australasia’s Annual Conference in Fremantle, Western Australia. Their paper is entitled 'Participatory professional development: Designing a mobile website that links student feedback with best practice teaching resources’ and it is based on their Ask Charlie project funded by the Office for Learning and Teaching. If you're interested in the project, please contact Kate via kate.thomson@sydney.edu.au

Other University of Sydney presentations included:

The shape of things to come: Peer-to-peer videos promoting safety and wellbeing at the University of Sydney
Rebecca Johinke

Shaping access and equity in the doctoral curriculum: questions, observations and provocations 

Tai Peseta & colleagues

Students as partners - a way to re-shape higher education pedagogy or neoliberal seduction?
Tai Peseta & Amani Bell

Next year the HERDSA  conference will be in Sydney, so save the date (and save on travel and accomodation fees!) 27-30 June 2017.

This July, the Sydney Law School presented their new strategies and technologies for enhancing learning at the Law eLearning Showcase, most notably through the creation of video and audio resources for today's students. The event was opened by the Dean of Sydney Law School, Professor Joellen Riley and supported by the Associate Deans of Education and Postgraduate Coursework, Dr. Scott Grattan and Professor David Hamer. The eLearning team of Mai Stringer and Cameron Murray showcased the technologies, and resources available to aid in the development of materials to be used in the delivery of legal education, including a suite of borrowable gadgets such as iPads, Android tablets, microphones and an All-in-one recording kit as well as a number of learning and teaching focused videos filmed using the school’s resources. Although the gadgets and videos were of great interest to those in attendance, the testimonies of guest speakers Professors Joe Campbell and Anne Twomey were a clear highlight of the presentation. Each Professor provided a recount of their experiences utilising the technology to produce audio and video materials to cover integral but static aspects of the curriculum (Legal history of Equity and the background to Public Law) in a manner that was sustainable to deliver and engaging to students. In Professor Campbell’s Equity unit of study site, the School is trialing offering the podcasts both as streams from YouTube and as downloadable files (both via Blackboard) to allow students the opportunity to listen to the content on mobile music device and at their leisure. The School plans to review the statistics at the end of the semester to gauge the popularity of each method and to help inform future progress in this area.

What was clear throughout the showcase was that such approaches privileged learning over technology, and were supported not only by the devices on display but the wonderful work of Mai Stringer and Cameron Murray whose combined knowledge and support for the School made this step in the educational revolution less daunting and more feasible through the provision of a suite of online resources and encouraging support. Such events herald an exciting era for teaching and learning at Sydney Law School. Mai and Cameron welcome questions, thoughts and feedback from those within the Law School, and the wider University, and can be reached at law.elearning@sydney.edu.au.

We have two great events coming up for those interested in widening participation, equity and inclusive teaching.

On Wednesday 24 August, the recipients of the Widening Participation travel grants will be presenting their research in progress. Come and join the discussion with Maegan Baker (FASS), Cathryn Forsyth (Dentistry), Melissa Hardie (FASS), Rebecca Johinke (FASS), Melinda Lewis (Educational Innovation), Renee Lim (Sydney Medical School), Kieryn McKay (FASS), Alison de Pree-Raghavan (Education & Social Work) and Karen Walker (FASS).

Topics include improving student engagement and retention at the University of Sydney, and developing Indigenous cultural competence.

Date: Wednesday 24 August 12-2pm - lunch will be provided
Venue: New Law School 102
Registration: Click here

On Thursday 1st September, we are delighted to welcome Professor Penny Jane Burke to give a seminar on her research on Capability, Belonging and Equity in Higher Education: Developing Inclusive Approaches.

Penny Jane Burke is Global Innovation Chair of Equity and Director of the Centre of Excellence in Equity in Higher Education at the University of Newcastle, Australia. Penny is passionately dedicated to developing methodological, theoretical and pedagogical frameworks that support critical understanding and practise of equity and social justice in higher education.

Her research expertise includes gendered formations, higher education access and participation, pedagogical experiences and practices, and student and professional identities. She has published extensively in the field of equity in higher education.

After returning to study via an Access to Higher Education course, followed by a BA Honours and MA, Penny was awarded a full-time Economic and Social Research Council doctoral studentship from 1998-2001, which resulted in the publication of her book Accessing Education Effectively Widening Participation (2002).

Her most recent sole-authored book, The Right to Higher Education: Beyond Widening Participation was published by Routledge in 2012. Her co-authored book Reconceptualising Lifelong Learning: Feminist Interventions (with Sue Jackson) was nominated for the 2008 Cyril O. Houle World Award for Outstanding Literature in Adult Education.

Penny was recipient of the Higher Education Academy’s prestigious National Teaching Fellowship award in 2008, is Editor of the international journal Teaching in Higher Education and she is the Access and Widening Participation Network Co-Convenor for the Society for Research in Higher Education (SRHE).

Penny has held the posts of Professor of Education at the University of Roehampton, the University of Sussex and Reader of Education at the Institute of Education, University of London.

Date: Thursday 1st September 10.30am-12.00pm - morning tea will be provided
Venue: Law Seminar Room TBC
Registration: Click here

Do you coordinate a large, first-year undergraduate or postgraduate unit? The Track & Connect program, a proactive retention strategy designed to increase student engagement and success during the transition to tertiary study, will be entering its ninth cycle in Semester 2, 2016.

Track & Connect provides students with key information about support services and resources, while also providing detailed, de-identified feedback for unit coordinators. It is part of a suite of analytics tools available to staff at the University.

If you think that the Track & Connect program might be helpful to your students and you’d like more information about the program, including our successful trial of text messaging software, please contact Dr Sophia Barnes, Student Experience Coordinator in the STAR Team, Student Support Services.

Please note that Unit of Study Coordinators will need to obtain approval from their Faculty or School to participate in the program.

If you're new to teaching at Sydney, you might want to check out the online program 'An Introduction to Teaching at Sydney'. It contains six modules: effective teaching, student engagement, assessment and feedback, inclusive teaching, evaluation and reflective practice, & support for you and your students. The program is primarily aimed at casual academics who have teaching roles, so please pass on the link to your tutors and demonstrators.

We're also running our two-day Principles and Practice of University Teaching and Learning (P&P) program in November. It is free for all staff, and forms part of the University's confirmation process for the appointment of continuing staff.

The April issue of Teaching@Sydney outlined some simple ways in which tools such as Word or Powerpoint can be used to ensure that teaching resources are accessible to the many students who have some level of visual impairment. Most handouts, lecture slides and manuals are made using these programs although the principle of building in accessibilty before conversion to PDF extends to other authoring tools, including LaTeX and Google Docs.

One of the easiest to implement of the tips is simply to use the University templates for Word and Powerpoint, which are designed with accessibility in mind (and to resist reducing the font size). The PowerPoint, A4 document and event booklet templates have recently been updated by Marketing and Communications with enhanced bar graphs for people with colour vision deficiencies. Switching teaching resources to these new templates is one step in making sure that they will be accessible to the widest range of staff and students.

The aim of this workshop on 20th July is to share intervention strategies to improve students understanding of key concepts in biochemistry.

Associate Professor Paula P. Lemons from the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of Georgia focuses on problem solving about threshold concepts in biochemistry. In particular, her group looks at student thinking about three concepts: the physical basis of interactions, the thermodynamics of macromolecular interactions, and metabolic pathway dynamics and regulation. They are currently about 2 years into a 5 year study of how problem solving develops within this domain over the career of a life sciences university student. They have developed a number of problems that include visual representations of biochemical phenomena, such as protein folding, and ask students to make predictions. In a recent study, they found that experts solved biochemistry problems more quickly and in fundamentally different ways than students. Among students, some completed expert-like solutions, but they did so much less efficiently. However, several students did not successfully solve the problem, and this lack of success occurred among beginning and advanced biology students.

Date:  20 July 2016, 10 am - 12 pm
Venue: Seminar Room 3110, Abercrombie Building

Register: Click here

This workshop on 20th July is led by Professor Michael Drinkwater and will cover how the teaching practice inventory (TPI) is used at the University of Queensland. The workshop will also focus on how it could be used at other Australian universities and possible collaborations on designing additional questions for our local context.

The Wieman & Gilbert Teaching Practices Inventory is a 72-item questionnaire that asks staff objective questions about the use of specific evidence-based practices in a course. It takes about 11 minutes to complete. Wieman argued in his recent visit to Sydney that program-level data like this are necessary to lead broad change in teaching practice. Some US universities are encouraging staff to use it in addition to student evaluations in the confirmation and promotion process. At the University of Queensland, it was used to measure teaching practice in all of the semester 1 BSc courses in 2015.

Date:  20 July 2016, 2-4.30 pm
Venue: Seminar Room 3110, Abercrombie Building

Register: Click here

Are you involved in a project or initiative which is innovative, scalable and re-thinks pedagogical approaches for today's learners and tomorrow's leaders, entrepreneurs and thinkers? Applications for the prestigious Reimagine Education Awards are now open for 2016. Alongside an overall winner, the awards cover a wide variety of categories reflecting the importance of innovations in pedagogy and technology and the need for these to be aligned.

The awards are announced at the Reimagine Education Conference held in the Wharton School, Philadelphia on 5-6 December 2016.

Follow in the footsteps of our award winners last year from the Faculty of Health Sciences and the Business School. If you are interested in applying, please contact us.

More details on the awards and conference are available on the Reimagine Education website.
 

The pick this month from Graham Gibb's blog is Idea 33 - that 'motivating students is not magic'. The end of a long semester seems a good moment to reflect on ways to increase student engagement. Is there a magic wand that some educators naturally possess or are there strategies that everyone can employ?

Graham Gibbs is one of the UK's most well known advocates of improving university learning and teaching. With his colleagues (Habeshaw & Habeshaw), he was responsible for the very popular '53 Interesting Ideas' books series that have supported countless teachers (new and experienced) navigate their way through tricky classroom and curriculum dilemmas. Gibbs's new blog 53 Powerful Ideas all Teachers Should Know About offers a research summary of key issues.

Although the  Office for Learning and Teaching will cease to exist after 30 June 2016, there are many excellent resources which have been produced as a result of projects funded by the OLT. These are still available on the OLT website and will continue to be added to as current projects and those recently funded are completed. 

The most recent group featured on the website includes that led by Helen Mitchell of the University of Sydney:

• Redefining Tacit Knowledge in Music Performance Evaluation: Preparing Perceptually-Aware Music Leaders

Among other reports just released which can be found on the website are :

• Facilitating Human Research Ethics Review for Student Research
• A Framework for Building Teacher Capacity and Student Engagement in STEM within School
• Improving Educational Opportunities for Aboriginal Education Workers through Technology
• and the 2015 report on academic integrity

Among the FAQs on the website about the closure of the OLT is the following question and answer about the resources:

Q. What will happen to the resource library on the OLT website?

A. The department is working to curate and secure a suitable accessible repository for the resource library. Until the new repository is established the resource library will be accessible through the OLT website link.

This project builds on the success of the 2014 and 2015 Sydney Teaching Colloquium ambassadors and involves five student ambassadors, supported by a student mentor, and working in collaboration with five unit coordinators to improve student learning about cultural competence in five units of study:

• PHTY3086 Physiotherapy in multisystem problems (Faculty of Health Sciences)
• ENGG2852 Project based organisational behaviour (Faculty of Engineering and IT)
• EDUP2009 Intercultural understanding in HSIE K-6 (Faculty of Education and Social Work)
• GEOS1003 Introduction to Geology (Faculty of Science)
• HSTY3902 History beyond the classroom (Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences)

The 2014 Ambassadors were co-authors of an article published in early 2016 in the International Journal for Academic Development’s Special Issue on Engaging students as partners. Through the process, they learned about academic publication and peer review. The 2015 Ambassadors will follow suit and are currently preparing their own journal article for publication. A highlight in 2015 was the presentation by the Student Ambassadors about cultural competence. In the STC feedback, it was considered to be the session that most changed university teachers’ thinking about cultural competence. 

In this year's project, we are aiming to extend the Student Ambassador initiative beyond the Teaching Colloquium to better support the university’s program of curriculum renewal in the area of cultural competence.

The project is linked with an OLT ‘Transforming Practice Programme’, which provides support to 11 Australian universities working with students as partners.

Join us on 22nd July for the next #edtech talks with Mark McEntee and Melanie Keep from the Faculty of Health Sciences.

Mark will talk about 'Flipping the classroom: a flippin’ engaging experience' and why the improvements in student engagement learning and experience have been worth the time investment for educational designers and academics.

Melanie will talk about 'Learning analytics / Personalised learning: provide personalised learning and reduce your inbox: using learning analytics to promote online discussions' and will cover quick-to-implement strategies for engaging students with online discussion forums and providing personalised support.

Date:  22 July 2016, 12.00 – 1.00 pm

Venue: Rooms 249/250, Educational Innovation, Level 2 South, Fisher Library F04

For more information and to register  click here

The University’s 2016-2020 Strategic Plan commits the University to a distinctive and outstanding learning experience. This outcome will be achieved through two key strategies: a transformation of undergraduate education and a transformation of the student learning experience. The new curriculum framework, and the graduate qualities and educational approaches embedded within it, require new styles and methods of teaching. The strategy seeks also to build on this by developing our capacity for more interactive and collaborative learning designs.

Equipping teaching staff to bring about these changes will mean new professional development opportunities to modify teaching approaches. A new professional learning framework is proposed, flipping and personalising professional development to ensure that each educator is provided with opportunities to continually and actively improve their practice, and include wider and more innovative uses of learning technologies. Possible ways to provide recognition and rewards for pursuing professional development are still being discussed, including mapping to the AP&D process, articulation with formal courses such as the Graduate Certificate in Educational Studies (Higher Education) and alignment with external national and internal frameworks.

During semester 2, the framework will be developed and trialled through new online resources and workshops. If you have any comments on the framework that is linked above, please contact Adam Bridgeman.

There are some small changes to lecture recording and the LMS for semester 2. 

First, if there are two screens in your lecture theatre, you can now record both of them when you are making your lecture recording. If you wish to record both screens log into the lecture booking system, select your booking, select Delivery Settings and if dual recording is available you’ll be able to select this option.

Second, any class held in a room that has its type listed as ‘seminar' or ‘lecture' will now be recorded by default. Information on room type is listed in the timetabling system.

In LMS news, from the beginning of next semester, students' names displayed in the LMS will be the names they provided as ‘preferred’ in their enrolment data. So if they have provided a preferred first name that is not the same as their ‘official' enrolled name, it will be the preferred name that is seen in the LMS; their ‘official’ name will not appear. For assessments, student ID can be used to identify students.

Positive Approaches to Disability Through Service-Learning is a Round 2 Educational Innovation Grant funded project led by Dr Michelle Bonati and implemented through a partnership between the Faculty of Education and Social Work and the Centre for Disability Studies Inclusive Education Program (IEP). It gave Bachelor of Education students the option of completing their EDUF3031 fieldwork experience by developing a service-learning project in small groups in collaboration with students in the IEP.

The IEP provides adults with an intellectual disability an opportunity to participate in The University of Sydney by auditing courses. Service-learning is a transformative pedagogy in which students engage in service activities that are linked to their learning outcomes through reflection, which has been implemented in teacher preparation programs to develop pre-service teachers' knowledge of disability and improve attitudes toward inclusion.

Each group of students developed a service-learning project that addressed learning outcomes; for example, a student from the IEP participating in EDEC 1001 Early Childhood Settings and Communities collaborated with her group to create a resource book for teaching arts and crafts to preschool children using photo-supported directions. Another group created a website on healthy lifestyles for children. A student from the IEP who was auditing EDHP1001 Physical Education demonstrated one of the lessons at a local YMCA. Nine participating groups from Semester 1 created reflection videos to share at a celebration event demonstrating their new knowledge related to their respective courses.

Michelle Bonati, Associate Lecturer, Faculty of Education and Social Work
Friederike Gadow, Research Fellow, PhD Candidate, Centre for Disability Studies, Sydney Medical School 

It’s 3MT time again! The Three Minute Thesis (3MT) is an annual competition for postgraduate research students. Students make a compelling presentation on their thesis topic and its significance to an intelligent, non-specialist audience in an engaging way in three minutes, using one slide.

Supervisors are encouraged to bring this to the attention of their students. 3MT is a great way for students to practise explaining their research to people who are not familiar with their field – skills that will serve them well when applying for funding or engaging media attention. Plus, it’s always lots of fun. And there are prizes – cash and the chance to travel to Brisbane for the Australasian final. Detailed information can be found here.

The University-wide final will be held at Camperdown on Saturday 27th August 2016. The national final will be held on Friday 30th September at the University of Queensland. More information on the 3MT competition more generally can be found on the Three Minute Thesis website.

On the 4th July, please join us to hear about and experience virtual reality (VR) technology and discuss its possibilities for teaching.

This event is presented jointly by Educational Innovation, ICT and the Library. A seminar will run from 12-1 pm in the Exhibition Space in the SciTech Library (booking required) followed by a drop-in, hands-on workshop in the Library's exciting new ThinkSpace directly above (no booking required). All are welcome - please pass on to interested colleagues including undergraduate and research students.

The capability of virtual reality (VR) technology has accelerated recently with the cost of devices falling to enable most phones to be adapted for a few dollars. VR helps immerse students in experiences too expensive, too inaccessible or simply too dangerous than would normally be possible. For more information, watch the recent TED talk.

Seminar date: 4 July 2016, 12-1 pm
Venue: Exhibition Space, SciTech Library (next to the entrance to the library)

Workshop date: 4 July 2016, 1-2.30 pm
Venue: ThinkSpace, Level 2 JFR plaza (mezzanine area above the SciTech Library)

For more information and to register for the seminar: click here

In a series of articles in The Chronicle from his book "Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons From the Science of Learning", James M. Lang presents simple and practical ideas ideally suited to try out in lectures. In the third article, three quick suggestions for helping students develop deeper connections with course material are given:

1. Give over 10 minutes at the end of a lecture once or twice a week for students to think about and then write down connections between the course and everyday life. Prompts might include; why the material matters to them or society or how it manifests itself in their lives or in TV shows, films or books. Students could also be asked to write about the connections they see between different topics in the course.
2. If there isn't time in class for (1), students could be asked to contribute a connection via the course's discussion forum or using social media. The character limit on Twitter forces students to be succinct and think about how to put their thoughts in one or two short sentences.
3.  Use the 'minute thesis' activity: write down a column of course topics and a column of course themes or outcomes and ask students to discuss and then write down how one of theme connects to two topics. This activity is well suited to the last week of a course as it helps students think about all of the material that has been covered and how it is all related to the course outcomes.

The University is pleased to be part of InSPiRE 2016 (July 4th-6th inclusive), this year hosted by UTS.  The inaugural 5-day InSPiRE 2014 event  was a great success and we expect InSPIRE 2016 to be even better!

The event represents a collaboration of five universities:  USYD, UNSW, UMQ, WSU, and UTS to deliver an innovative and highly participative 3-day researcher development programme for our PhD students, focusing on "Making Agility and Resourcefulness part of your Research Career". Attendees from the University of Sydney are subsided by the DVC-Education portfolio, bringing the registration fee down to $130.00. For more information visit.

• Hear from a range of academics in different disciplines at the university who have successfully embedded the development of communication within their curriculum.
• Participate in a workshop with some of the presenters to explore how you might be able to draw on their experiences in your curriculum.
• Join a network of scholars across the university who are embedding the development of communication into the curriculum (the CECLD Network).
• Hear from our guest speakers Dr Jim Donohue and Julian Ingle about some of the work that they have been involved with, embedding the development of communication – particularly writing – into curriculum at the UK Open University and at Queen Mary University of London.

We invite you to:

Submit a 250 word abstract for a 30 minute presentation showcasing how, why, and with what effects you are embedding the development of communication into your curriculum by June 3 2016.

Email your abstract submission to Dr Bronwyn James, Head Academic Enrichment and Associate Professor Alyson Simpson, Faculty of Education & Social Work.

This event is hosted by the Curriculum Embedded Communication and Language Development Scholars’ Network (CECLD) and the Learning Centre – Academic Enrichment, The University of Sydney.

Visit the website for further information.

The Office for Learning and Teaching has announced the successful grants in its final grants round. (See report in this issue of Teaching@Sydney about the closure of the Office). Eleven grants were successful nationally in a very competitive round.

We warmly congratulate Associate Professor Fran Waugh who leads the team which has been awarded $283,000 for their project The contribution of becoming reflective on the employability of teachers and social workers. The team includes Professor Robyn Ewing as well as members from other Australian and UK universities.

Warm congratulations to Dr Abelardo Pardo and his team for being awarded $348,000 for their project Scaling the provision of personalised learning support actions for large student cohorts. The team includes Dr Kathryn Bartimote-Aufflick and members from a number of other Australian Universities.

And congratulations too to Pearl Rozenberg, a partner in the University of South Australia's project on Contract cheating and Assessment Design: exploring the connection.

Although there will be no new rounds of grants, resources from previous and current grants are appearing and will continue to do so for some time. Recent publications include:

• Planning studio in the 21st century: Educating leaders for a complex world
• Building Resilience in Teacher Education
• Demystifying Grammar: Rethinking Language Awareness for Teacher Education
• Evaluation of 2013 Strategic Priority Commissioned Projects
• An Innovative Primary Care Program Advancing Competency To Support Family Violence.

You will find these reports and more on the OLT website.

In Idea 30 Departments differ widely in their teaching quality, Graham Gibbs focuses on the significance of the local meso-level context as a change catalyst for learning and teaching. In investigating the question 'what makes a department good at teaching?' Gibbs invites us to see teaching as a responsibility beyond the efforts of the individual charismatic teacher.

Graham Gibbs is one of the UK's most well known advocates of improving university learning and teaching. With his colleagues (Habeshaw & Habeshaw), he was responsible for the very popular '53 Interesting Ideas' books series that have supported countless teachers (new and experienced) to navigate their way through tricky classroom and curriculum dilemmas. Gibbs' blog '53 Powerful Ideas all Teachers Should Know About' offers a research summary of key issues, and is hosted by the Staff and Educational Development Association (SEDA) in the UK.

The notice below about the future of  the Office for Learning and Teaching is the statement from the Federal Government which appears on the OLT website. It explains that the OLT will cease to exist. The national teaching awards will continue but not the grants and fellowships.

More funding is being directed to help students make informed decisions about their university education, and measures to improve quality in higher education in Australia. The Government will redirect funding from the Promotion of Excellence in Learning and Teaching in Higher Education (PELTHE) to fund these new investments. For greater transparency the Government will enhance the innovative Quality Indicators for Learning and Teaching (QILT) website to better support student choice and help them make decisions about their higher education future.Additional funding will also enable the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency to meet its additional provider registration and course accreditation activity, and manage the ongoing need for additional capacity to investigate and respond to emerging risks.

From 30 June 2016 the Office for Learning and Teaching will cease operating.The department will manage all ongoing grant and fellowship projects to their conclusion, with the final projects scheduled to complete in 2018.

From July 2016 there will be no new grants or fellowships. The Promotion of Excellence in Learning and Teaching in Higher Education will continue to fund awards through the Australian Awards for University Teaching programme for national recognition of excellence and innovation in learning and teaching.The 2016 Australian Awards for University Teaching (AAUT) citations and awards will continue as planned, with state-based citations ceremonies scheduled for September and October and a national awards ceremony in December 2016.

The email address learningandteaching@education.gov.au will remain as the primary contact for enquiries about projects and awards.

 Further information can be found in the FAQs.

As part of her OLT Fellowship on Engaging and Retaining First-in-Family Learners, Associate Professor Sarah O'Shea will be running a two-day forum exploring best practice and research in this field. This free two-day event will be held at the University of Wollongong on Thursday 24th and Friday 25th November, 2016 and is targeted at higher education staff in various disciplines and areas.

The forum will commence with afternoon workshops on Thursday 24th November from 2.00 - 4.30pm, focused on two exciting programs with Indigenous students that demonstrate innovations in the design of access, engagement and retention of first-in-family students. Throughout the day on Friday 25th, the forum will feature presentations from invited guest speakers as well as 15 minute lightning Best Practice presentations in supporting and engaging first-in-family learners. Look out for the call for submissions will July 2016.

See the website for more details.

On Monday 10th October, Professor Alison Cook-Sather will be visiting the University. She will be giving a workshop on working in partnership with students to enhance higher education. The workshop will be an interactive experience that combines sharing of principles and examples of partnership, with participants reflecting on their own ideas and contexts and discussing how they might put partnership into practice. Please register your interest here.

Alison Cook-Sather is the Mary Katharine Woodworth Professor of Education at Bryn Mawr College and Director of the Teaching and Learning Institute at Bryn Mawr and Haverford Colleges. Supported by grants from the Ford Foundation, The Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Dr. Cook-Sather has developed internationally recognized programs that position students as pedagogical consultants to prospective secondary teachers and to practicing college faculty members. She has published over 70 articles and chapters, and her books include Engaging Students as Partners in Learning & Teaching: A Guide for Faculty (co-authored with Catherine Bovill and Peter Felten, Jossey-Bass, 2014) and Education Is Translation: A Metaphor for Change in Learning and Teaching (Penn Press, 2006). 

Alison’s visit is funded by the Widening Participation Network, a joint initiative of the Social Inclusion Unit and the Education Portfolio. 

A program for students to learn about helping their friends when times are tough.

A mental health and well-being survey conducted by Counselling and Psychological Services, or CAPS at the University of Sydney in 2012 found that most students turned to their family and friends for help if they experience emotional difficulties. Research also indicates that peers lack effective helping skills to support a friend in need. With the goal of developing a resilient campus community, a five-session training program and student group named Sidekicks was launched in 2013.

The Sidekicks program aims to increase understanding of how emotional difficulties are potentially maintained and resolved through styles of coping such as use of experiential avoidance and psychological flexibility, as per Acceptance and Mindfulness approaches to mental health. In addition, students are trained to respond to the emotional difficulties of others with empathic listening, acceptance of the internal experiences of themselves and those going through emotional difficulty, communicating a validation of internal experiences, as well as referral to health professionals where necessary. After completing the course, students graduate to become a full-fledged Sidekick (student well-being mentor) and can be involved in regular meet-ups and community events around campus.

At a broader level, programs such as Sidekicks may set up a system of social capital in peer groups within the university community. Social capital has been defined as the collective value that results from a web of cooperative relationships between individuals who mutually help to facilitate the resolution of problems (Coleman, 1990). Participation in training like Sidekicks may establish an environment of mutual benefit for the helper and helped. That is, one may feel a sense of value for providing a civic duty of helping others skillfully, and doing so may set up a norm of reciprocity within that peer group. Evaluation of the Sidekicks program indicates its effectiveness in both improving confidence to help others in emotional distress, and providing a framework for reducing stigma around seeking professional help for emotional difficulties.

While the transition from adolescence to adulthood may at times be turbulent, destabilising and alienating, the preliminary data from the Sidekicks program suggests that interventions promoting the psychosocial skills of young people can go beyond the individual in distress. Rather, interventions can help to foster effective response skills of those who are turned to most frequently for assistance: the peer group. If the university student community engages with such training, there is the potential for two beneficial outcomes among students: more effective responses from peers to periods of personal destabilisation and the development of a more integrated student who can take away lifelong skills in perspective taking and empathic communication.

This piece was written by Dr Philomena Renner, Head of CAPS (Counselling and Psychological Services). More details can be found on the Sidekicks webpages.

Congratulations to the following recipients of 2016 Widening Participation travel grants:

Maegan Baker, Cathryn Forsyth, Melissa Hardie, Rebecca Johinke, Melinda Lewis, Renee Lim, Kieryn McKay, Alison de Pree-Raghavan and Karen Walker.

These staff members will be presenting their work on widening participation and inclusive teaching at a range of national and international conferences. There will be a chance for staff to hear about their work at a Widening Participation Network event later this year - stay tuned for further details, and join the network here.

The 2016 Australasian Conference for Undergraduate Resarch (ACUR) will be held this year at Central Queensland University, Rockhampton North Campus from 27-28 October. Undergraduates, 2015 Honours students, and MRes students are invitied to submit an abstract or a paper about their research study by July 1st. For further information, visit the ACUR website.

This year will also see the first ever World Congress on Undergraduate Research at Qatar University, Doha in Qatar from 13-15 November. The Congress invites presentations on the following themes:

• Climate Change, Environment and Sustainability
• Global Health
• The Global and the Local
• Information and Technology
• War and Peace in the 21st Century
• The World We Live In and the World we Make

Abstracts for the World Congress close on June 1, 2016.

2016 ePortfolio Forum - Connecting learning to the future

28-29 September 2016
Sydney Conservatorium of Music
The University of Sydney

The call for proposals for the 2016 ePortfolio Forum is now open. Proposals should fit into one or more of the following themes. Those proposals not fitting into these themes should provide an explanation of how the proposal supports the overall event theme of “Connecting learning into the future”.

• Evaluating the impact of eportfolio use
• ePortfolios beyond formal education and training
• ePortfolios supporting career development
• ePortfolios supporting professionalism
• ePortfolio pedagogy
• ePortfolio technical innovation and issues

Submissions are being called for:

• Poster: A0 static presentation which is pinned up at the forum (both days)
• Short (peer reviewed paper) presentation:15 min presentation + 5 min Q&A – published peer reviewed paper on day one (28 Sept)
• 20×20 presentation: 6-7 mins presentation consisting of 20 slides which run for 20 secs each on day one (28 Sept)
• Short workshop: 40 mins hands-on/interactive session on day two (29 Sept)
• Facilitate a professional conversation: lead a group discussion around a topic during the ‘Ideas Exchange’ working lunch on day two (29 Sept) – no presentation slides permitted
• Long workshop: 2.25 hr hands-on/interactive session on day two (29 Sept)

Call for proposal timeline:

• 6 June – Call for proposals close
• Week beginning 20 June – Notify outcome of call for proposal submissions (including notification of invitation to submit a peer reviewed paper)
• 18 July – Submission of peer reviewed papers
• 8 August – Notify of acceptance of peer reviewed pending any required revision
• 7 September – Submission of updated peer reviewed papers

Visit the website for further information related to the forum and submissions.

Join us on 10th June for the next #edtech talk where Dr Jo River from the Sydney Nursing School will present a model of flipping lectures using team-based learning that has improved student engagement in her faculty and is transferable to other disciplines.

On Time, Prepared and Engaged: A Practical ‘Third Way’ for Improving student engagement discusses a blended strategy that targets falling lecture attendance without resorting to punitive measures or the need to provide constant ‘edutainment.’

Date:  10 June 2016, 12.00 – 1.00 pm

Venue: Room 218, Level 2 South, Fisher Library F04

For more information and to register  click here

In a series of articles in The Chronicle from his book "Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons From the Science of Learning", James M. Lang presents simple and practical ideas ideally suited to try out in lectures. In the second article, three quick suggestions for setting up a successful lecture before it even starts are presented:

1. Try to arrive a few minutes early for each lecture and make the effort to chat to a couple of students. By talking to different students each time, this can help build a relationship with the class and an inclusive, engaged atmosphere. Even waiting outside the room for the previous class to finish can provide an opportunity to talk.
2. Put the agenda or learning outcomes for the lecture up on the board or projector before the lecture starts. During the lecture, remind students where the class is up to to aid note taking, emphasise the alignment and how organised you are!
3. Never leave the screen blank: put an interesting or intriguing image, phrase or question up on the projector. This could be from later in the lecture, to provoke curiosity, or relate to a previous class, to awaken prior knowledge - you don't have to wait for the clock to strike to start teaching.

ACSME is a great opportunity for university-level science and mathematics educators to share ideas and innovations and hear about key new ideas and research on student learning. In 2016, the conference is being hosted by University of Queensland with a timely theme:

'The 21st Century Science and Maths Graduate:
What is the place of our STEM graduates in the world? How do we prepare them?'

The conference runs from 28-29 September with an additional day of free discipline workshops on 30 September.

A list of keynote speaker, registration details and an invitation to submit a proposal for a talk, poster, or workshop is available on the ACSME website.

If you are new to teaching at Sydney, and especially if you are a casual academic, you might want to take a look at the new videos that are embedded in the online program 'An Introduction to Teaching at Sydney'.

The videos feature interviews with experienced teachers, and show some snippets of classroom activities. The online program contains practical tips and resources on six key topics:

1. Effective teaching
2. Student engagement
3. Assessment & feedback
4. Inclusive teaching
5. Evaluation & reflective practice
6. Support for you and your students

As an example, take a look at the video on effective teaching:

Flipping the class by encouraging students to prepare before a lecture, perhaps by providing short videos, helps build engagement and attendance. It also ensures that they are ready to be active in class. Especially in large lectures, it can be difficult for the lecturer to connect with all of the students and to gauge the level of understanding. Asking direct questions of the audience can be difficult - often the same set of students reply, those at the back can feel excluded and others may be too intimidated to contribute in front of the whole class.

Response devices can provide an electronic way of interacting and engaging with the whole class, without any of these problems. Most run as web apps on mobiles, tablets or computers. They allow the teacher to set up multiple choice and short answer questions, and polls. The responses provide the teacher and students with instant, graphical feedback on the level of understanding and help identify misconceptions whilst the class is still running. Common uses include:

• Multiple choice tests with distractors chosen by the teacher to identify misconceptions.
• Short answer questions used as tests or as a way of getting student opinions or feedback.
• Polls to vote on issues and guide discussions.

Although it is possible to use response systems to assign marks, most lecturers chose the anonymous option. Many students will have their own smart phone but, to ensure equity and promote group work, it is often effective to ask students in pairs or groups to agree and record a joint answer.

There are a large number of student response systems available - a list is available on EDUCAUSE. A popular free system used by many lecturers is Socrative. For more information on Socrative, see:

• Choose your own adventure: using live feedback to place learning back into the hands of students (Danny Liu, presentation to the 2013 Sydney Teaching Colloquium)
• The slides and recording of Danny Liu's on Fostering student engagement and participation using online tools in and out of class

For further information, research on their effectiveness and ideas on uses, see the links below:

• An instructor's guide to the effective use of personal response systems (Carl Wieman).
• Classroom Response Systems (Vanderbilt Center for Teaching).

The Australian Collaborative Education Network (ACEN) is offering three research grants valued at $10,000 each.
ACEN aims to foster research and scholarship initiatives in Work Integrated Learning (WIL) by endorsing research proposals and identifying and advancing WIL research in the 2016 priority areas:

• Innovative and sustainable WIL models
• Assessment practices for WIL
• WIL models that promote entrepreneurial practice
• WIL in STEM
• Evaluating return on WIL investment for stakeholders (Note: Projects related to this theme may focus on a particular discipline, WIL Model or Industry/community partner)

Applications are due by 5.00 p.m. AEST Friday, May 27, 2016. The University of Sydney is a paid member of ACEN and so staff are eligible to apply. Visit the ACEN website for further information.

Since the establishment of the Office for Learning and Teaching in 2012 Australian universities have benefitted from its awards, grants and fellowship programs and strategic development papers, which have provided resources and support for educational excellence and innovation. This is no doubt one of the reasons why Australian university teaching is well regarded internationally in teaching and learning innovation.

Teaching at The University of Sydney has benefitted from both the national initiatives and the awards and grants awarded to staff at this university: past winners and successful grant proposals.

A petition to save the funding for the OLT has been launched, as there has been no action on the recommendation in the 2015 review of the OLT to create a successor organization. If there are no funds in the Budget then the work will not be continued.

OLT Senior Fellow Sally Kift has published an open letter on the Australian Learning and Teaching Fellows website in which she writes that the government’s “exceedingly modest” investment into research in higher education teaching and learning has generated “massive returns on investment and demonstrable enhancements to the quality of student learning outcomes and their experience of learning.” She asserts, “In a post-OLT world, it will be a struggle for Australian universities individually and collaboratively to maintain a focus on educational innovation and entrepreneurship.”

Read more.

The Feedback for Teachers (FFT) survey system has recently been updated as part of the University's revision of its suite of student experience surveys. The FFT provides an avenue for individual staff members to gain feedback on their teaching in particular contexts, e.g. lectures, tutorials, and practicals.
 
Going forward the FFT will be fully online. The ordering process has been upgraded to sync directly with timetabling information where available, so classes can now be selected from a list without the need to enter student IDs.
 
Survey open and close dates will now be set to mirror the Unit of Study Survey (USS) dates for the unit of study.
 
Orders for Semester 1 are now open!
 
Further information on the FFT is available at http://www.itl.usyd.edu.au/feedback/. Queries regarding the FFT can be sent to qa.surveys@sydney.edu.au.

On Friday 13 May the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre is hosting a policy roundtable on 'Innovative Teaching on Southeast Asia'. The roundtable brings together academics and educators who are passionate about teaching, to talk about new and exciting ways to deliver content and enhance students' experiences of Southeast Asia.

The policy roundtable will incorporate short presentations from academics, as well as time for discussion and engagement. Topics include innovative approaches to teaching in lectures and tutorials, in-country teaching and techology-enhanced teaching.

For more information, and to register click here.

The Education Portfolio is hosting the following international conference:

Academic life in the measured university: pleasures, paradoxes and politics
Wednesday 29 June – Friday 1 July 2016
New Law School, Camperdown campus
The University of Sydney

The draft conference program is now available at the website. Highlights include the three keynotes:

• Does society get the university it deserves? How to conduct our academic lives in the impulse university
  Professor Gert Biesta, Brunel University London
• From a roar to a whisper: academic voice and governance within the measured university
  Dr Julie Rowlands, Deakin University
• Weighing up Futures: Experiences of Giving up an Academic Career
  Associate Professor Ruth Barcan, The University of Sydney

Additional highlights include the following presentations:

• The university as an infinite game
• Constructing the fantasy student
• Training ethical researchers in a risk averse environment
• Academic writing and the utopia of ordinary habit
• Professors of Practice: agents of performative or traditional cultures?
• I have measured out my life with HERDC points
• Lost souls: the desocialisation of academic labour in the measured university

Early bird registration has now closed but standard registration will remain open until 3 June. There is a separate registration rate for full-time students, sessional staff and for day registration.

Visit the conference website to view the draft program and to register, or stay in touch by following on twitter #ACIDC2016.

Contact: Dr Tai Peseta on 9351 5812.

It has been estimated that the human brain takes in around 34 gigabytes of data each day. For our students, much of this will come in the form of slides and reading materials that we have made. When making teaching resources with tools such as Word or Powerpoint, it is relatively easy to ensure that they will be accessible to the many students who have some level of visual impairment. By making use of features in these software packages before converting to PDF, your resources can become either immediately accessible or are optimised to work properly with screen readers.

Detailed instructions on using the accessibility features in different versions of Word and Powerpoint for Windows and Mac are provided on the excellent WebAIM website. Tips include:

• Structure the document using headings and use Word styles for these rather using bold or a larger font size.
• Add alternative ('alt') text to images.
• As URLs may not make sense to screen readers, use descriptive text for links (as shown above) instead.
• If the document may get printed, add the URL to the descriptive text for the link.
• When including graphs, consider using a texture or pattern as well as colours to distinguish data series.
• For Powerpoint, consider using the University template as well as the tips above.
• In the 2010 (and newer) versions of Word and Powerpoint, use the inbuilt accessibility checker to identify and repair any remaining issues.

Vision Australia offer a free 'Document Accessibility Toolbar' for Word to make accessible document creation even easier.

As students will usually be linking to your resources on the course website, ensuring this is designed to maximise accessibility can also ensure learning outcomes for all students are maximised:

• Tips on making accessible websites
• Tips from Blackboard on making accessible sites and resources in the LMS 

Finally, you can use a screen reader emulator or browser add-on to test your resources:

• Screen reader extensions for popular browsers include 'Vox' for Chrome and 'Fangs' for Firefox.
• WAVE (WebAIM's web accessibilty evaluation tool).

Do you want to be able to contact and support individual students based on their performance and engagement but find it difficult in your large unit of study? Do you find the usual all-class emails and notifications promote an impersonal and one size fits all approach that many students treat as spam?

Learning analytics is the analysis and use of University-held student information to improve students’ learning experience and outcomes. The 'Knowing Your Students' report available in unit of study LMS sites provides a detailed description of the cohort. During semester, data can be used to investigate how the class is performing. It can also be used to identify groups or individuals - via engagement levels or success measures for example - that can then be used to provide  personalised feedback and support.

The Student Relationship Engagement System (SRES) is web-based software that allows teachers to easily and efficiently collect and analyse student data. This data could come from many sources and might include tutorial attendance, quiz marks and Blackboard log in dates. Alongside being a way to quickly collect attendance, marks and other information using a mobile app, the SRES can easily import grades and other data.

After using their judgement to select the most relevant information for their context, coordinators can build filters to identify groups or individuals to communicate with via personalised email and even SMS. For example, students may be considered to be at risk if they have not logged onto Blackboard for a few weeks and have missed an assessment deadline. The system then allows the coordinator to send an initial personalised communication with just these students. Or, she may want to personally congratulate a group of students who have consistently contributed to discussion and have been turning up to class, and provide them with interesting extension material.

Developed at Sydney, the SRES is being actively used in many units of study here and in other institutions. Although only an experimental system at the moment, its strength lies in the way it puts the coordinator and the individual students at the centre:

• The coordinator decides which data is most relevant for gauging student engagement and success.
• The coordinator decides the best way to design actions that either support or further challenge individuals or sub-sets of students.
• Students receive messages that are personal to them and their learning, assessment and engagement at that date.

If you would like to more about using innovative learning analytics tools like this to provide personalised support, come along to the workshop on 12th May and take part in the conversations on the Educational Innovation and SRES groups on Yammer.

On 6th May, please join us for a pair of #edTech talks on enhancing student feedback by Dr Bryn Jeffries and Dr Liz New based on developments assisted by Educational Innovation Grants.

Bryn Jeffries, from the School of Information Technologies, will talk about a tool to auto-grade assessment and its role in 'Motivating students to do formative assessment'. Automatically graded assessment tools provide rapid or even instant feedback to students and can provide powerful ways to extend formative assessment. For fully online courses, especially those with large enrolments such as MOOCs or SPOCs, they may be the main way in which students are assessed. This talk will be of interest to educators wanting students to engage with formative assessment and thinking of incorporating online assessment tools. Bryn will explain how he has used one particular tool to improve the educational experience of his Introductory Database Systems unit and give an overview of the lessons he has learnt over its development and delivery.

Liz New, from the School of Chemistry, will discuss how consistent and effective feedback to students can be delivered by 'Developing rubrics for use across assessment types within a program' using TurnItIn. The School of Chemistry, and the Faculty of Science more generally, are working towards a unified system in which TurnItIn rubrics are used to provide feedback for all assessment types with common elements across assessment types and subject areas. With TurnItIn used for all written assignments, the talk will be of interest to educators who use or would like to use rubrics or who would like to improve the consistency of feedback in large units of study.

Liz New was awarded both a Vice Chancellor’s Award for Outstanding Teaching and an OLT Award for Teaching Excellence in 2015.

Date: 6 May 2016, 12.00pm-1.00pm
Venue: Room 218, Level 2 South, Fisher Library F04
For more information and to register: click here

The Centre for English Teaching (CET) is developing a series of five MOOCs (online courses) aimed at preparing students for university prior to commencement of undergraduate studies. As part of the information gathering process, and to ensure that what we cover in the MOOCs align with the needs of faculties, we are gathering information from faculty members on what areas students need to develop to prepare them for university.

If you are interested in contributing your valuable insights, please fill in this quick 5-10 minute survey:

CET MOOC survey

In a series of articles in The Chronicle from his book "Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons From the Science of Learning", James M. Lang presents simple and practical ideas ideally suited to try out in lectures. In the first article, four quick suggestions for grabbing students' attention at the start of the lecture are presented:

1. Give students a chance to answer one or two interesting questions, or even pose them online beforehand, then return to them at the end of the lecture.
2. Review the previous lecture but flip the normal approach by asking the students to tell you what the main points were.
3. Initiate a discussion on what the students know about the topic already and probe any misconceptions they have.
4. Ask the students to write down their responses to whichever of the exercises above you use. Spending a few minutes writing is an excellent transition from a distracted outside world to a focussed class.

Please join us for this hands-on workshop about personalised learning. Using Learning Analytics to Provide Personalised Support to Your Semester 1 Students. In this workshop we’ll consider the range of data already being collected via various University systems and how to access these data sources (e.g. LMS usage, cumulative assessment results, discussion board usage, attendance, etc), and you’ll have the opportunity to think about what else you might like to monitor and how you could collect this information. We will also make use of some basic analytics tools in readily available software (including Blackboard, SRES, Piazza) that can assist you in collating and interpreting this data. Finally you’ll have time to work on designing some personalised learning support actions for your Semester 1 students and also consider how you might evaluate if your support actions ‘worked', all in a collegial collaborative environment. We’ll demonstrate how SRES software could be used to facilitate the deployment of some types of support.

Date: 12 May 2016, 2.30pm-4.30pm
Venue: Learning and Teaching Space Room 218, Level 2 South, Fisher Library, Camperdown campus

For more information and to register: click here

Graham Gibbs revisits the notion that objective assessement is likely to be near impossible. In Idea 43: Most assessment involves (unreliable) professional judgement and is all the better for it, Gibbs suggests that the time devoted to second and third marking might better be devoted to discussion of assessors' decision-making especially at the points of assessment design, marking and moderation.

Graham Gibbs is one of the UK's most well known advocates of improving university learning and teaching. With his colleagues (Habeshaw & Habeshaw), he was responsible for the very popular '53 Interesting Ideas' books series that have supported countless teachers (new and experienced) to navigate their way through tricky classroom and curriculum dilemmas. Gibbs' blog '53 Powerful Ideas all Teachers Should Know About' offers a research summary of key issues, and is hosted by the Staff and Educational Development Association (SEDA) in the UK.

The OLT Teaching Excellence and Program Awards are highly prestigious and provide recognition of significant achievements in teaching at a national level.

The University of Sydney has had a number of winners in recent years. In 2015, Dr Elizabeth New received an Early Career Teaching Excellence Award and the Peer Assisted Learning Programme from the Central Medical School, Dr Annette Burgess, Associate Professor Kirsten Black, Associate Professor Renata Chapman, Professor Craig Mellis and Associate Professor Chris Roberts, received an Award in the category Programs that Enhance Learning.

If you have already received acknowledgment for the quality of your teaching or the quality of program designed to enhance student learning from your Faculty, you should consider an application to the OLT awards. Two workshops will be held in early May to outline what’s required to apply for nomination by the University. Both workshops will also help you to consider what makes an application nationally competitive.

10 May 2016: Workshop: OLT Awards for Teaching Excellence
13 May 2016: Workshop: OLT Awards for Programs that Enhance Learning

Applications for both awards are due on Tuesday 31st May. The applications selected by the University will receive additional support in fine-tuning their application prior to submission to the OLT in early July.

The 2016–20 Strategic Plan sets out a vision for a distinctive Sydney education. Alongside a renewal of what students learn is a focus on how they learn. The transformation of the learning experience will require innovation, creativity and collaboration in our teaching approaches, blending the best aspects of face-to-face interactivity with engaging and mobile online resources. Increased access to information on student learning and engagement through learning analytics will give us the evidence to provide personalised learning and support to students even in the largest classes. The transformation will also need flexible physical and virtual learning environments built to facilitate these new learning designs and promote collaborative inquiry.

Through the educational innovation grants and the many other activities reported in #edTech talks, Teaching@Sydney and elsewhere, it is clear that this work is already happening. In the coming semesters, the Educational Innovation team will be working more deeply in faculties, providing professional learning and educational design expertise on long-term projects. This work will seek to facilitate innovation in learning design, help to embed the use of learning analytics and effective educational technology and refresh professional development opportunities so that they reflect faculty needs and changes in technology.

Refreshing approaches to teaching can enhance the experience of our present students as well providing the tools needed to deliver the new curriculum. Quick resources and ideas for how to do this in your own classes include:

• Attending the #edtech talks
• Trying an idea from the teaching insights series
• Moving some content to an engaging online video to free up class time for active learning
• Learning about the learning analytics tools available at Sydney and attending a workshop on using them to personalise student support and learning.
• Asking a trusted colleague to attend your class and attend lectures from colleagues who are known innovators.
• Sharing tips or asking for help from your colleagues and peers, including via the Educational Innovation Yammer group.

The University’s Widening Participation Network is pleased to announce that up to twenty conference travel grants are available to support academic and professional staff to present at relevant domestic or international conferences.

The Widening Participation Network is a joint initiative of the Social Inclusion Unit and the DVC (Education) Portfolio.

The University is committed to increasing the participation of students of promise from low socio-economic backgrounds, regional and remote areas and Indigenous students; building our research agenda on social inclusion/exclusion; and developing teaching and learning activities that support student engagement and cultural competence. Expressions of interest are due by COB Friday 22 April. For full details, please see the guidelines.

Move more, sit less

According to a 2013 survey of University of Sydney staff and students, many of us don’t get enough daily physical activity or exercise. Regular physical activity provides a range of positive health benefits, including improvements in cognitive functioning and wellbeing – both areas of huge benefit for students and staff alike.

Healthy Sydney University recommends the following opportunities inside the classroom to encourage your colleagues and students to move more, sit less. These opportunities will ensure you and your students remain focused, engaged, attentive and healthy.

1. Stand and stretch
   Include a brief standing break during long periods of sitting, such as lectures and seminars
2. Take the lead
   Use the lapel microphone in lectures and seminars to lead discussions while on the move
3. Break it up
   Encourage group work to allow students to meet and move during longer classroom sessions
4. Tailor the timetable
   Consult with the timetabling unit to include a change of room after a lecture or tutorial for a brisk walk between classes

Mental wellbeing

In 2015, Healthy Sydney University conducted a review of the scientific literature, looking at the most effective university-wide strategies and approaches that higher education institutions can implement to promote the mental wellbeing of their students.

The results have been summarized in ‘A blueprint for student mental wellbeing’ factsheet, which encourages academic staff to consider:

• Using alternate academic strategies – such as changing the grading or assessment in a course;
• Infusing mental health knowledge and skills in the curriculum – so all students have the opportunity to discuss and learn about mental wellbeing
• Develop and promote the use of evidence-based apps and e-tools to support wellbeing – such as ReachOut’s The Toolbox or Smiling Mind
• Build healthy physical environments on campus – promote green spaces, natural light and ventilation.

If you would like to be involved with Healthy Sydney University or would like more information, please contact Elly on 9036 7891 or healthy.uni@sydney.edu.au.

In idea 42, Gibbs argues that student engagement has now become too slippery a concept, and that in invoking it, we need to be more precise. Do we mean:

• students' engagement with their studies
• students' engagement with their campus learning environment
• students' engagement in quality assurance
• engaging students with teaching improvement and enhancement
• student engagement with teaching practice
• student engagement with research (e.g., with the latest research, in research communities, as researchers)

In addition, Gibbs points to a very interesting literature review on student engagement conducted by the Higher Education Academy in the UK.

Graham Gibbs is one of the UK's most well known advocates of improving university learning and teaching. With his colleagues (Habeshaw & Habeshaw), he was responsible for the very popular '53 Interesting Ideas' books series that have supported countless teachers (new and experienced) navigate their way through tricky classroom and curriculum dilemmas. Gibbs' blog 53 Powerful Ideas all Teachers Should Know About offers a research summary of key issues, and is hosted by the Staff and Educational Development Association (SEDA) in the UK.

ascilite 2016

The Australasian Society for Computers in Learning in Tertiary Education (ascilite) is calling for submissions for the 33rd annual conference hosted by the University of South Australia in Adelaide, Australia on 28-30 November. The conference theme 'Show me the learning', focuses attention on demonstrating the learning afforded by educational technology. Submissions close on 25 July. For further details, visit the website.

ISSOTL 2016

The theme of this year's conference of the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (ISSOTL) is 'Telling the Story of Teaching and Learning'. The conference will be held in Los Angeles from 12-15 October. Submissions are now open and close on 29 April. For further details, visit the website.

TLTHE Call for submissions: Australian Stories of Partnership

Colleagues working with students as partners might wish to contribute to an upcoming special issue of Teaching and Learning Together in Higher Education (TLTHE) on ‘Australian Stories of Partnership’. 

TLTHE, created and edited by Professor Alison Cook-Sather, serves as a forum for the reflective work of university academics, staff and students working together. Its premise is that dialogue and collaboration among staff and students is central to teaching and learning in higher education. TLTHE is unique, publishing essays written in an informal/conversational style, using first person pronouns, with (very) light use of citations. The idea is to provide a forum for in-process work, exploration, experimentation, and reflection.

Essays by staff (professional, academic or hybrid) and students seeking to reshape Australian higher education through dialogue and collaboration amongst staff and students exploring the possibilities of ‘students as partners’ in Australian Higher Education. 
 
Publication Date: November/December 2016
Submission Date: By 1 September 2016
Guidelines and more detail: download here
Contact: Guest Editor, Dr Kelly Matthews, k.matthews1@uq.edu.au

Given that disability affects the lives of one in every five Australians¹, our graduates are likely to in the future, either experience a disability themselves or be in a position of care for someone living with a disability, or encounter disability in their lives in a professional or social context.

Disability awareness (DA) is a way of allowing students with or without a disability to share a learning environment with others as well as gaining skills for the future. Disability awareness has been defined as a “positive attitude and increased empathy toward people with disabilities.”² Researchers have suggested that disability awareness training helps in “providing teachers and students with an understanding of the challenges faced by students with different abilities.”³

In 2014, a DA program was designed for final year pharmacy students in an advanced pharmacotherapeutics course. A needs analysis conducted with the cohort in initial weeks of Semester 1 (2014) using a custom designed questionnaire identified that students were not confident of managing medication issues or communicating effectively with clients who had a disability.⁴ An educational package comprising 4 specialised lectures and a 3 hour workshop was designed to address these gaps and implemented in the latter half of the semester. This package utilised a learning cascade of exposure (exposing learners to disability), experience (creating a simulated experience of an actual disability) and ownership (getting learners to take ownership for ensuring an equitable environment for those with disability).⁵

Results indicated that pharmacy students’ (n=256) perception of their ability to identify medication issues in people living with disabilities and confidence in communicating with patients with a disability was enhanced. Content analysis of descriptive comments from students post workshop suggested that students, on reflection, had a more empathic understanding of medication use in people with disabilities.⁴   

These results indicate that implementation of DA training in University based courses can enhance the attitudes of students towards disability, and awareness about disability; prompt reflection on how disability may impact future career/social pathways; and help students build self-appointed roles/responsibilities towards people living with a disability.

This piece was written by Associate Professor Bandana Saini, Faculty of Pharmacy. Please contact her for further information.

1. Australian Network on Disability. Accessed at http://www.and.org.au/pages/disability-statistics.html

2. Foley JT, Tindall D, Lieberman L, Kim S.  How to develop disability awareness using the sport education model, Journal of Physical Education, Recreation & Dance, 2007;78(9):32-36

3. Fittipaldi-Wert J, Brock S. I can play too: Disability awareness activities for your physical education class. Strategies, 2007; 20(5): 30-33.

4. Davis S, Saini B, Bosnic Anticevich S. Attitudes of pharmacy students regarding pharmacotherapeutics of people with disabilities. In the proceedings of the Australasian Pharmaceutical Science Association Annual Conference December 2014.

5. Wilson S, Lieberman L. Disability awareness in physical education. Strategies, 2000; 13(6), 12:29-33.

On Friday 8 April 2016, please join us for an #edtech talk by Simon McIntyre.

This presentation discusses the ideal vision of a personalised learning experience incorporating goal setting as a key element, and explores the challenges of trying to implement and improve this design within current MOOC technology over three successive iterations of the MOOC 'Learning to Teach Online'. Data collected about the goals and participant activity within the course have begun to reveal the difficulty in devising a truly dynamic, adaptive, personal goal driven learning environment in the MOOC space, within the confines of current technical and analytic frameworks. The lessons learned about obtaining and making meaningful response to participant goals will also be discussed.

Simon McIntyre is the Director of Learning and Innovation at UNSW | Art & Design, and an Apple Distinguished Educator. After developing and teaching online courses in art and design for several years, he has helped many other academics design and teach online through designing and convening a range of award winning academic development programs. He is recognised internationally for his pioneering learning and teaching approaches for fully online and blended education across several disciplines.

Simon’s research is on the development of new online pedagogies to evolve education into a globally networked practice. His recent work explores the potential of mobile technologies and open learning both on and off-campus. He has led the design and creation of a range of open education resources such as numerous educational videos, iTunes U content, and an award winning interactive iBook, which is currently featured as an exemplar on Apple Education’s US website.

Date: 8 April 2016, 12.00pm-1.00pm
Venue: Room 218, Level 2 South, Fisher Library F04
For more information and to register: click here

The flipped classroom makes the best use of both preparation and in-class time to maximise student engagement and success. Could the pre-lecture video be the tool to maximise engagement with the face-to-face lecture in the age of recorded classes?

Preparation has always been a key part of the learning process: technology just makes it both potentially more effective for more learners and easier to track. Colleagues across the instititon and beyond are finding that structured preparation, whether through scaffolded reading lists or short video lessions, dramatically increases student engagement. As a consequence, it also seems to be key for ensuring attendance at face-to-face classes in an age where content and information can be obtained in so many other ways.

Put simply - facilitatiing engagement with your material before class means that you can have deeper interactions in class and make best use of that time. Teachers following the flipped class model report improved engagement anf enjoyment, by both students and teachers.

Kaltura is a user-friendly video delivery system, akin to YouTube, providing high quality streamed content within the closed learning management system (LMS / Blackboard). As an education tool, the key aspects of the 2016 version are screencasting and embedding of muiltiple choice questions. It allows easy, desktop creation of screencast video lessons with embedded multiple choice questions. It is thus ideal for creating preparation material for flipped classes: it enables teachers (and potentilally students) to easily produce full video lessons or resources directly and quickly from a desktop or even from a phone.

This means that slide presentations can be easily converted to interactive and effective video lessons on a desktop from existiing Powerpoint slides. Editing and uploading to the LMS does not require additional software. Multiple choice questions can be embedded in any part of the video lesson, so that students are motivated to complete the lesson as they receive feedback on their comprehension and understanding and are set up to maximise the benefits of attending class.

Providing students with engaging and interactive preparation resources such as Kaltura has never been easier. Further information and support is available on the LMS, via the Educational Innovation helpdesk and through the Educational Innovation group on Yammer.

What is your experience of this tool or others in engaging students with material before class? How do you then change the face-to-face experience to maximize its potential for learning? Share your ideas and experiences! 

Before the Sydney Ideas lecture on 11 March, Nobel Laureate Professor Carl Wieman and Dr Sarah Gilbert facilitated a special workshop for students and teachers on teaching challenges and strategies in science education. The wide ranging discussion covered topics relevant to effective teaching in all discliplines, including motivation, engagement, active learning and assessment. Building on the rich collection of research-informed and practical tips and resources from the Carl Wieman Science Education Initiative, key ideas from the workshop included:

• Evidence that active learning approaches dramatically improve student learning and are more enjoyable for both students and teachers,
• Ways to evaluate the effectiveness of undergraduate lectures and
• Increasing the effectiveness of mid-semester exams and quizzes in promoting learning.

To self-evaluate the extent of your own use of research-based teaching practices, why not complete the anonymous rubric provided by the Initiative and used by lecturers across the world?

• Teaching practices inventory

Links to a recording and the slides of the workshop are available on the 'Educational Innovation' group on Yammer.

Alongside reading our flagship monthly Teaching@Sydney newsletter, you can now keep in regular touch with educational innovation at Sydney and share news and views:

• By following @SydneyEduInnov on Twitter
• By contributing to the Educational Innovation Group on Yammer - the most vibrant group on Yammer in February and, so far, in March!
• Using MS Outlook (unfortunately, RSS feeds are not currently supported in Outlook for Mac but you can add them if you have access to a PC and they will then appear in Outlook for Mac):
  • Copy the address of our RSS feed (http://feeds.feedburner.com/edu/TeachingAtSydney)
  • In Outlook, right-click the RSS Feeds folder and choose Add a New RSS Feed.
  • In the New RSS Feed dialog box, enter the URL of the RSS Feed. Tip: If you need help finding the RSS feed URL on a website, look for an RSS icon.
  • Choose Add > OK.
     

The NSW/ACT ACEN Chapter are pleased to invite you to a  free interactive workshop:

Enhancing workplace learning through mobile technology

Venue: The University of Sydney Business School CBD Campus, Level 17,  133 Castlereagh St
Time: 10am-12pm (registrations from 9am)
Date: Friday 1 April, 2016

Presented by Franziska Trede PhD, Professor of Higher Education, Charles Sturt University

In this 90 minutes workshop participants will:

• learn about the OLT funded project titled “Enhancing workplace learning through mobile technology";
• hear about the processes used to develop mobile resources for learning in professional workplace settings;
•  trial a preliminary set of resources and share their ideas and feedback; and
•  develop a better understanding of the possibilities and challenges of effectively using mobile technology to enrich learning experiences on placement.

Bring along your devices to trial resources that have been developed!

For more information and to register please click here

How can we use data to optimise learning and our teaching?

At the start of semester, many lecturers conduct informal surveys of their classes to understand the background of their students. For example, knowing the degrees and other units of study being taken by the class can help them provide context and relevant examples. Similarly, knowing that students are the first in their families to attend university or are new to Australia may led to additional support or resources being offered. 

The 'Knowing Your Student' report is available for the first time for all standard units of study across the institution this semester. It uses centrally-held information to provide a detailed description of the cohort in each unit of study. It updates each night so that it reflects the sometimes large changes in enrolments that occur over the first few weeks of semester. As the system develops and ideas come in from teachers, additional information will be added. If you are teaching in a unit of study this semester, you can access the report for your students by following the 'Unit of Study Analytics' link in the 'Evaluation' section of your unit website on the LMS. A mock report is available below.

Download the mock report

As the semester develops, you can also use the other reports available there to help you understand how your students are engaging and progressing. This information could be used, for example to provide additional resources or assistance at specific times of the semester, spot the activities that increase or decrease engagement, or help you re-design your assessments and unit of study based on evidence of what students are doing. Tips on reading the reports and setting up your site to maximise their potential can be in the quick guide linked below.

Download the quick links guide

These reports mark the first step in enabling teachers across the institution to study, analyse and re-design their teaching and learning enviroments using data: learning analytics. This is a key priority for the University in the coming years. More information on research in this field or ways in which you can connect with others who are interested in practical applications is available on the Analytics at Sydney website. You may also be interested to attend a workshop on 15 March on personalising learning and support. Also keep reading Teaching@Sydney and connect with the Educational Innovation group on Yammer for additional professional learning opportunities.

Nobel Laureate Professor Carl Wieman and Dr Sarah Gilbert will be facilitating a special workshop on Friday 11 March covering teaching challenges and relevant strategies developed and/or tested in science education initiatives. The workshop is open to all but registration is required.

The workshop will run before Professor Wieman's Sydney Ideas lecture later in the afternoon.

Event details

Date: Friday 11 March 2016
Time: 1.00pm - 3.00pm
Venue: Seminar Room 344, New Law School Annex

Please join us for this hands-on workshop about personalised learning. During this workshop, we will provide a demonstration of the Student Relationship Engagement System (SRES). The SRES allows teachers to easily and efficiently collect and analyse data about their students. Quickly collect attendance, marks, and other data using a mobile app, and easily import grades and other data from files you may have on hand. Once you have your data in the SRES, use powerful and customisable filters to personalise your feedback to students and engage with them through email and SMS. You will hear from colleagues who have used the tool to send students personalised emails, reach out to students who are at risk of failing the unit of study, and monitor attendance at labs, tutorials and lectures. In addition, you will be shown a new analytics/machine learning feature that is being piloted. This feature allows teachers to uncover hidden patterns in their student data, reflect on how students and staff are interacting with their unit, and make evidence-informed decisions about how best to support or challenge students and improve the unit design.

Please register here Lunch will be provided.

Event details

Date: Tuesday 15 March 2016
Time: 12.00pm - 2.00pm
Venue: Rooms 249 & 250, Learning and Teaching Space, Level 2 South Fisher Library, Camperdown campus

You are invited to participate in this hands-on workshop about enhancing student use of discussion forums. Posting, replying and reading posts in online discussions have been linked to better student outcomes, including end of semester grades (Cheng, Pare, Collimore & Joordens, 2011) and sense of community (Woods & Ebersole, 2003). Despite, this students report checking forums infrequently (Viehland & MacCallum, 2006).

In this workshop, we provide a demonstration of two new discussion board tools that you can use in your units of study. You will also receive strategies for encouraging student participation in, and engagement with, discussion forums. 

Please register here Afternoon tea will be provided.

Event details

Date: Thursday 10 March 2016
Time: 2.30pm - 4.30pm
Venue: Rooms 249 & 250, Learning and Teaching Space, Level 2 South Fisher Library, Camperdown campus

In idea 19, Graham Gibbs revisits the issue of 'class sizes' in universities arguing that cohort size is strongly
negatively correlated with student performance. Read Class size matters...

Graham Gibbs is one of the UKs most well known advocates of improving university learning and teaching. With his colleagues (Habeshaw & Habeshaw), he was responsible for the very popular '53 Interesting Ideas' books series that have supported countless teachers (new and experienced) navigate their way through tricky classroom and curriculum dilemmas. Gibbs' blog 53 Powerful Ideas all Teachers Should Know About offers a research summary of key issues, and is hosted by the Staff and Educational Development Association (SEDA) in the UK.

The University of Sydney is a partner on three successful Office for Learning and Teaching (OLT) grants announced at the end of 2015. Our warmest congratulations to all those staff involved in these category 1 grants.

Helping first year students flourish through languages: Integrating positive psychology, transition pedagogy and CLIL principles

Lead institution: Flinders University (Dr Antonella Strambi)
Sydney contact:  Associate Professor Antonia Rubino, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences
In the context of second language learning, increasing student attrition and lack of motivation to progress beyond introductory levels have been repeatedly noted. This project aims to: contribute to first-year University students' psychological, emotional and social wellbeing, by capitalising on the unique features of the second language (L2) learning experience; increase the perceived value of language studies; and sustain learners' motivation to study languages.

Design options for the future doctorate

Lead institution: The University of Melbourne (Professor Hamish Coates)
Sydney contact: Professor Marie Carroll, Director of Educational Development, Charles Perkins Centre
This project proceeds from a growing perception that the Australian doctorate, while effective, is not optimised to best serve the interests of industry, academia or candidates. This project is advanced as a landmark re-thinking of the doctorate. Working from current policy and practice, the project will help Australian universities fashion targeted and effective futures for the research and professional doctorates. This project delivers research-driven options for building the quality of the doctorate in Australia, as well as a suite of resources to inform institutions and candidates. The project engages leaders in the field and extends prior institutional, national, scholarly, and international investigations into the doctorate as well as academic and professional work. It involves research and environmental reviews, proposals for policy and strategy, surveys and interviews, and consultation with Australian and institutional stakeholders.

SMARTfarm learning hub: next generation technologies for agricultural education

Lead institution: The University of New England (Dr Mark Trotter)
Sydney contact: Associate Professor Richard Heath and Associate Professor Brett Whelan, Faculty of Agriculture and Environment
The industry demands on higher education agricultural students are rapidly changing. New technologies are revolutionising the farming industry but the education sector is failing to keep pace. This project will develop a key resource, the SMARTfarm Learning Hub that will increase the skill base of students using a range of new technologies and innovations. The Hub will provide a combination of real-time data from a variety of sensors along with historical time series data from numerous current and developing sensors across a number of working properties. The data will be offered up through collaboration with a number of cloud based computing platforms providing students with immediate skills in the systems currently being applied and developed by industry. The SMARTfarm Learning Hub will increase the knowledge and skill base of existing agricultural students, increase the progression from secondary to tertiary study and attract and engage the next generation of experts in this field.

After attending a faculty-based introduction to university teaching, casual teaching academics may be keen to find other opportunities for professional learning. Here are some suggestions:

• Participate in a short, fully online program ‘An Introduction to teaching at Sydney’
• Attend teaching and learning workshops held in your Department/School/Faculty
• Explore the university's eLearning services
• Learn about culturally competent teaching via an online program
• Check out the smart casuals guide by The National Tertiary Education Union
• Be on the lookout for other opportunities to gain teaching experience e.g. giving a guest lecture.

For further information, please contact Dr Amani Bell, Educational Innovation team.

We are pleased to announce that the University of Sydney has recently become an insitutional member of the Society for Learning Analytics Research (SoLAR). 

SoLAR was founded in 2011 to support the emerging field of learning analytics. Key activities are the Journal of Learning Analytics, the annual conference Learning Analytics and Knowledge (LAK), and smaller events held throughout the world including ALASI, which Sydney hosted in 2015.

It is intended that our institutional membership will further enable academic and professional staff and research students at Sydney to pursue their interest in learning analytics by providing a connection into a network of experts and fellow enthusiasts around the world.

The good news is that institutional membership means unlimited free individual memberships for all staff and students at Sydney. Sign up now via the SoLAR website using our discount code available on the Sydney Analytics website. Individual membership benefits include access to members-only online events and materials, as well as discounted registration fees for the LAK Conference and other events.

Keep up to date with learning analytics activities at Sydney via Twitter @sydneyanalytics or by joining the Learning Analytics Research Group (LARG) email list. 

Are you interested in exploring ways to support, engage and retain students who are the first in their families to come to university? Dr Sarah O’Shea, Australian Learning & Teaching Fellow, University of Wollongong, will be presenting her research  and discussing practical strategies.

Morning tea and lunch will be provided.

This presentation reports on research conducted with students who are first in their family (FiF) to come to university, through interviews and surveys with both learners and their families a richly descriptive insight into universities experiences will be provided. First-in-family learners are characterised by substantially poorer educational outcomes and at greater risk of attrition then their second or third generation counterparts (ABS, 2013; Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, 2014; Coates & Ransom, 2011; National Center for Education Statistics, 2012).

Drawing on a range of research studies including an OLT funded multi-institutional study of FiF students (O’Shea, May, Stone & Delahunty, 2015), this presentation will focus on the ways in which these learners navigated their higher education journey and enacted success within the higher education environment. There will be opportunity for discussion and reflection particularly as this relates to how institutions can: a) respond more effectively to student diversity; b) implement targeted support strategies that account for the learning contexts of this cohort; and c) explore strategies for connecting with families and community of FiF learners.

About Sarah

In 2015, Sarah was awarded an OLT National Teaching Fellowship, to support her work with students who are first in their families to come to university. Broadly, Sarah’s research focuses on student access and participation within the university sector, with particular reference to students from identified equity groups including those from low-SES backgrounds, Indigenous students, mature aged students as well as first-in-family learners.

For further details, and to register, click here.

Every year the Education Portfolio works with Faculties, Campus Improvement Services (CIS) and Information and Communications Technology (ICT) to increase and improve teaching and learning spaces. At the beginning of the 2016 academic year, the new Abercrombie Business School Building will be opened on the corner of Abercrombie and Codrington Streets on the Darlington campus. This building will relieve timetabling pressure across the University with 54 new teaching spaces, including 8 lecture theatres, 35 seminar rooms and 7 learning studios. It will also include a large learning hub split into three wings with capacity for 300 students. Staff from the portfolio were involved in the consultation process and in all the planning stages for the build. Training for academics who will be teaching in the new spaces was also provided by staff from Educational Innovation.

Over the summer break, the Learning Space Development Program, co-ordinated by the Education portfolio, refurbished, replaced, and refreshed existing teaching spaces across several campuses to meet University standards for these spaces. The works included the complete refurbishment of seating, flooring, lecterns, and the AV systems in seven lecture theatres, including much-needed updates to one of our largest teaching spaces, Wallace lecture theatre. New projectors, computers, screens, and lecterns were also installed in 10 teaching spaces. Minor refresh work to maintain more recently upgraded AV systems was completed in 10 other teaching spaces, including fully equipped learning studios with student computing designed for group work.

Collaborate (Ultra)

Collaborate (Ultra) is a web conferencing and collaboration system managed from within the University’s Learning Management System (LMS). This system enables engagement, discussion, collaboration and interactivity between participants who are not physically co-located. We have recently updated to a new version (Ultra); this is much more flexible and easier to use than earlier versions. Collaborate’s split screen allows all functions to be used simultaneously:

• Share Audio, Share Video, Raise Hand, Chat
• Add and share files and running applications
• Share a virtual whiteboard on which everyone can write and comment
• Live comment on presentations as they occur

Collaborate is useful, for example, when you are teaching students on more than one campus, because you can conduct real-time classes in more than one location. Students can even log in from home and join the Collaborate class. You can present material that you have prepared earlier (eg powerpoint slides or visual material); you can give a lecture or short talk using both audio and video; you can write on a whiteboard while students watch. Students can participate in a variety of ways in these webinars: they can ‘raise their hand’ to indicate a question; they can also write on the whiteboard, they can annotate material presented to them; they can be organized into groups across locations to work, then report back to the whole class. Collaborate can also work with HDR students who may not have workspace on campus. Several can log in together and share their progress with you or to work on a presentation. This can be a useful way to check progress, develop academic presentation skills, or to discuss a common area of interest, such as a shared methodology with distant students.

Kaltura

Did you know you can now create, edit and upload videos you have made yourself into the LMS? Kaltura, the enterprise video and audio streaming system, has been enhanced to allow creation and editing of personal videos using mobile, desktop or webcam capture. Kaltura provides a better viewing and listening experience for students than media that has been directly loaded into the LMS. The videos are streamed in higher quality, are automatically adapted to the students’ internet connection speeds, and are viewable on most mobile devices. Your students can also submit video files for assessment using Kaltura and store their own media in the cloud.

Want to use Collaborate or Kaltura?

Contact the Sydney eLearning helpdesk to get you set up with these news tools. There are also regular workshops advertised on CareerPath to get you started, so please register for an introductory workshop. Support resources can be found on our Collaborate and Kaltura pages.

Inclusive teaching practices involve creating a learning environment where students maximise the potential for their own learning, and the learning of others. Such approaches benefit all students but are particularly important for students with a disability to ensure they have the opportunity to learn and be assessed appropriately. Over the last few years, Disability Services have introduced academic plans for students across a number of faculties, with very positive staff and student feedback. This semester, these plans will be rolled out across all faculties ensuring a consistent process for staff and students, including those whose studies take them across multiple faculties.

As outlined recently in Staff News, academic plans outline the adjustments needed for a student, personalized to the requirements of each of their units of study and its assessment structure. For the students, this means that such information is available up front; reducing stress, providing a valuable study management tool and allowing them to focus on their studies. For staff, it means adjustments can be arranged at the start of semester; reducing correspondence with Disability Services and providing more individualised and consistent information on how to assist students.

With unit outlines now becoming available to students one week before the start of semester through the learning management system, academic plans will become available in the first few weeks of semester for students already registered with Disability Services. Plans for commencing students will follow as they register in the coming weeks.

Students with disability are an integral part of the University and of our society. A range of resources are available to staff who are teaching, coordinating or supporting students. These include:

• For staff, practical strategies for inclusive teaching and learning, information on supporting students with disability and a comprehensive disability awareness training manual.
• For students, information on Disability Services and the registration process and library and assistive technology resources from the Library.

Each edition of Teaching@Sydney this year will be focusing on different aspects of inclusive teaching and learning, whether this is occurring in face-to-face, online or blended environments. If you are interested in contributing an insight from your own teaching or experiences, please contact Dr Amani Bell.

The Centre for English Teaching (CET) is developing a new online course, as a MOOC, to prepare undergraduate students for university prior to commencement of their studies. In this course, CET is working together with the Educational Innovation team to address the needs of students entering tertiary studies, including those who may be under-prepared.

In order to ensure that the course addresses the needs of each faculty, we would like to gather information from coordinators and others involved in supporting commencing undergraduate students, about the skills that they should ideally possess before starting their studies.

If you or a colleague would be like to be involved by participating in a 30 minute interview, or by completing a short questionnaire, please contact Katherine Olston in CET. 

Do you coordinate a large, first-year undergraduate or postgraduate unit? The Track & Connect program, a proactive retention strategy designed to increase student engagement and success during the transition to tertiary study, will be entering its eighth cycle in semester 1, 2016. 

Track & Connect provides students with key information about support services and resources, while also providing detailed, de-identified feedback for unit coordinators.

If you think that the Track & Connect program might be helpful to your students and you’d like more information about the program, please contact Dr Sophia Barnes, Student Experience Coordinator in the STAR Team, Student Support Services. 

Please note that Unit of Study Coordinators will need to obtain approval from their Faculty or School to participate in the program.

Sydney Ideas, along with the Charles Perkins Centre Science of Learning Science Node, is hosting a talk A scientific approach to teaching science and engineering by Stanford University Professor and Nobel Laureate Carl Wieman, Department of Physics and Graduate School of Education.

Guided by experimental tests of theory and practice, science and engineering have advanced rapidly in the past 500 years. Guided primarily by tradition and dogma, science education meanwhile has remained largely medieval. Research on how people learn is now revealing much more effective ways to teach, learn, and evaluate learning than what is in use in the traditional science class.

The combination of this research with information technology is setting the stage for a new approach to teaching and learning that can provide the relevant and effective science education for all students that is needed for the 21st century. Although the focus of the talk is on undergraduate science teaching, where the data is the most compelling, the underlying principles come from studies of the general development of expertise and apply widely.

Date: Friday 11 March, 2016
When: 4.30pm - 6.00pm
Where: Charles Perkins Centre Auditorium, Johns Hopkins Drive, The University of Sydney
Cost: Free and open to all with online registration requested

To read more about Professor Wieman and to participate in the event, visit the Sydney Ideas registration page.
 

The University is pleased to be hosting Professor George Siemens for a Sydney Ideas lecture: Neuroscience and Learning Analytics: A historic leap in understanding learning?

Abstract: The past decade has solidified and advanced two important tracks in helping researchers understand learning: neuroscience and big data. Sophisticated imaging techniques allow insight into the functioning of the human brain that was until recently unimaginable. Small controlled studies are laying a foundation for a new science of learning. In contrast, big data, often generated in technological environments, presents researchers with fuzzier and messier data than what is common in neuroscience. The large N, however, offers tantalizing insights into the social, affective, and meta-cognitive aspects of learning as it happens in authentic work and school settings. This presentation will explore the methodological differences that underpin the neuroscience and big data (learning analytics) frameworks of learning research and suggest ways in which they might contribute to future educational models. 

Professor George Siemens is Director of the LINK Research Lab at the University of Texas, Arlington. He is a world leader in learning analytics thinking and theorising. George is credited with creating one of the first massive open online courses (MOOCs) and continues to develop and teach in highly popular online courses. In 2011 he founded the Society for Learning Analytics Research (SoLAR) and hosted the first Learning Analytics and Knowledge (LAK) Conference.

Date: Friday 4 March 2016
Time: 3.00-4.00pm
Venue: Law School Foyer

Please register here (refreshments provided).

Keep up to date with learning analytics activities at Sydney via Twitter @sydneyanalytics or by joining the Learning Analytics Research Group (LARG) email list. 

The 2016 Vice Chancellor’s Learning and Teaching Awards

In semester 1 2016, the suite of Vice-Chancellor's Awards for Learning and Teaching will be in review. It is expected that an announcement about a new set of awards will be made toward the end of semester 1, and applications open shortly afterwards.

Should you have any queries, contact Dr Tai Peseta.

The 2016 Office of Learning and Teaching Citations and Awards

The Office of Learning and Teaching (OLT) Awards cover three categories: Citations, Awards for Teaching Excellence and Awards for Programs which Enhance Learning. Applications are submitted by the University to the OLT.

The due date for the OLT Citations is 5pm Monday 21 March 2016.

The due date for the OLT Awards for Teaching Excellence and Programs which Enhance Learning is 5pm Friday 27 May 2016.

You can now register for workshops related to the preparation of an OLT Citation. Additional workshops will be announced in late March for the OLT Teaching Excellence and Programs awards.

The Vice-Chancellor’s Academic Misconduct and Plagiarism Taskforce¹ has resulted in a number of changes that will be in place for semester 1 this year. Academic integrity is an indispensable part of good assessment and any breach of academic integrity must be regarded as a failure of education. Among the changes is a requirement for faculties to ensure that the first year of every course across the University includes at least one lecture, tutorial or similar session focused on academic integrity. For students, this should cover what academic integrity looks like within their specific discipline and as they prepare for rigorous tertiary-level study, and how it can best be achieved by students. Teachers could, for example, focus on incidents of poor practice within the discipline that have attracted media or regulatory attention and assist students with undertaking a ‘scaffolded’ assignment that teaches good writing and referencing styles as used within the discipline. A University-wide online module is also being rolled-out for all commencing students, and teachers may wish to use this as a basis for a more in-depth classroom discussion. To trial the module for yourself, send your unikey to Roman Tantiongco in the Educational Innovation (EI) team. Feedback on the module can be sent to the Office of Educational Integrity.

In addition to improving the education offered to our students on educational integrity, Unit of Study coordinators should also review the assessment offered in their units to consider how educational integrity is assured. This may involve considering the mix of assessment undertaken in the unit, and, as the unit concludes, explicitly considering any breaches that did arise during the semester before offering that Unit again.

The newly established Office of Educational Integrity will collect examples of best-practice in teaching and assessment from across the University and provide coordination and support on these and other educational integrity-related matters. An intranet page for the Office also provides more information on these and other changes to come as a result of the Taskforce’s recommendations. A student page is also being developed. Faculty-based information sessions have been scheduled across the University to run from February – March, and further support is available through the EI team on matters such as setting up and using the Learning Management System, Turnitin, and assessment design. You can also seek information on these matters from your faculty’s Educational Integrity Coordinator.

1. The Vice-Chancellor’s Academic Misconduct and Plagiarism Taskforce ran from May – November last year and made a number of recommendations which were fully endorsed by SEG, the Academic Board and Senate. This year, implementation of the resulting Educational Integrity change program is being managed through the Education Portfolio.

Welcome to the new year, and to the first edition of Teaching@Sydney for 2016.

At the end of 2015, the Institute for Teaching and Learning, and Sydney eLearning merged to form a new Educational Innovation (EI) Team located in the DVC (Education) Portfolio. By bringing together this expertise, we hope to work more closely and consistently to support the University's ambitions outlined in the new Education strategy. The EI team will offer more focused and strategic support to faculties and professional learning opportunities for individuals. The new Educational Innovation Team is led by Professor Adam Bridgeman, Director of Educational Innovation.

At present, the new EI team is occupied with supporting the University's education commitments in a range of areas:

• Educational Integrity roadshows (with the new Office of Educational Integrity)
• LMS readiness for the start of semester 1
• Supporting the pedagogical uses of Turnitin through workshops: book through Careerpath or organise a special session through Ricky Connor.
• Supporting the professional learning of academic staff via blended learning opportunities: Sessional staff, Principles and Practice, Graduate Certificate, Foundations for Research Supervision programs
• Helping staff prepare applications for the University and national teaching awards and citations.

It may take a little time for the new EI team to re-brand itself so please be patient with us as you may still receive messages marked as being from the Institute for Teaching and Learning, and Sydney eLearning.

You can now keep in touch and share education news, stories and views more immediately by following our new Twitter account (@SydneyEduInnov) and through the vibrant Educational Innovation Yammer group.

We look forward to working more closely with you, and wish you a productive start to the new year!

As 2015 draws to a close, we would like to thank you for your interest in and involvement with education initiatives over the past year. We wish everyone a happy and relaxing summer break, and look forward to exciting collaborations in the new year.

In idea number 34, Graham Gibbs describes the challenges involved in Courses working as Integrated Systems. While Biggs's notion of constructive alignment has become key to coherent course design (the learning outcomes are reinforced by the teaching and learning activities, and assessment), Gibbs reminds us that students need an idea of the overall direction but also, guidance about what to focus their efforts on.

Graham Gibbs is one of the UKs most well known advocates of improving university learning and teaching. With his colleagues (Habeshaw & Habeshaw), he was responsible for the very popular '53 Interesting Ideas' books series that have supported countless teachers (new and experienced) navigate their way through tricky classroom and curriculum dilemmas. Gibbs's new blog 53 Powerful Ideas all Teachers Should Know About offers a research summary of key issues.

2016 hosts a number of interesting higher education conferences. Here's our list of some of the interesting ones:

• Quality in Postgraduate Research (QPR) conference: 20-22 April 2016, Adelaide
  Theme: Society, Economy and Communities: 21st century innovations in doctoral education
  Although the deadline for abstracts has already closed, you can still get along to the conference to hear about the latest research in the policy and pedagogy space related to research education. Visit the website.
• 6th Biennial Threshold concepts conference: 15-17 June, Halifax Canada
  Theme: Thresholds on the edge. Submissions close on 4 January 2016. Visit the website.
• 5th International Academic Identities Conference: 29 June-1 July, Sydney
  Theme: Academic life in the measured university: pleasures, paradoxes and politics
  The Education Portfolio is hosting the conference which will be held at the University of Sydney Law School. Submissions close on 15 January 2016. Visit the website.
• Students Transitions Achievement Retention and Success (STARS) conference: 29 June-2 July, Perth
  Submissions close on 1 February 2016. Visit the website.
• Higher Education Research and Development Society Australasia (HERDSA) conference: 4-7 July, Perth
  Theme: The shape of higher education. Submissions close on 5 February 2016. Visit the website.
• Higher Education Close-Up 8 conference: 18-20 July, Lancaster UK
  Theme: Locating social justice in close-up research in higher education. Submissions close on 15 February 2016. Visit the website.
• International Consortium for Educational Development (ICED) conference: 22-25 November, Cape Town
  Theme: Ethics, care and quality in educational development. Submissions close 30 May 2016 (round 2). Visit the website.

We noted with interest this advice from Bridget Middlemas at the University of Roehampton:

One of the most effective ways to encourage students to read is to make the readings part of your unit of study formal assessment process, by the judicious use of a Reflective Reading Log. This task encourages students to read between 5-10 articles over a period of 5-10 weeks, and to make brief notes about each article as they do so. Ideally this task should be linked to the next upcoming assessment task, so that the work students do helps prepare them for and is relevant to this next task (e.g., essay, report). Students can be asked to reflect on topics such as:

• How does this article/chapter relate to my future professional practice?
• Could it be used as a source in my upcoming essay/assignment/mid-semester exam etc.?
• What would be a useful quotation, and why?
• Is there anything more that I could find out about this topic?
• Which two other authors have also discussed this topic?

The log can be given a grade on its own (e.g., weighted 10%), or later handed in as an appendix to the main assignment. Anecdotal evidence indicates that it is a friendly and non-threatening way to encourage students' reading on unfamiliar topics. Students can also bring their logs to class, to work on them in class and/or discuss in a peer group.

To read more about reflective reading logs and other innovative types of assessment, see this short booklet (p18 for reflective reading logs).

The University is committed to engendering a culture of academic integrity among our students, and educating students about academic honesty. Plagiarism is a form of academic dishonesty. Knowing more about students’ reasons for plagiarising can help you to develop and use teaching strategies to prevent students plagiarising in the first place.

Students may plagiarise because they:

• Do not think it is dishonest to paraphrase a person’s work and present it as their own without acknowledgement (Franklyn-Stokes & Newstead, 1995);
• Do not know how to reference appropriately in the relevant discipline (Wilhoit, 1994; Owens & White, 2013);
• Have not developed sufficient skills in reading and taking notes from sources to be able to effectively compose their own academic writing (Wilhoit, 1994);
• Have not developed sufficient skills in academic writing, and specifically, using an ‘original voice’ and ‘authorial identity’ (Owens & White, 2013)
• Lack confidence in their ability to express an argument using an ‘original voice’;
• Are anxious and under stress because of study workload and/or financial pressures, and feel they must plagiarise to succeed in their studies (Ashworth, Bannister & Thorne, 1997; Zobel & Hamilton, 2002);
• Are seeking ways to expend the least amount of effort in obtaining high grades in assessment tasks (Wilhoit, 1994);
• Perceive that the assessment task is trivial and/or irrelevant and so is not worth their genuine effort, and does not require ‘original thought’ or an original voice (Ashworth, Bannister & Thorne, 1997); and/or
• Perceive that academic dishonesty by other students is condoned by staff, and there are no consequences in their unit of study or course if they cheat or plagiarise (McCabe, Trevino & Butterfield, 2001).

Adapted from The Institute for Interactive Media & Learning, University of Technology Sydney.

Many of the reasons why students plagiarise are related to their skills and their confidence in their ability as academic writers. For a range of other reasons see Zobel and Hamilton (2002).

The design of assessment in your course context also plays an important role in preventing students from plagiarising (Macdonald & Carroll, 2006; Ward & Trigwell, 2015).

Click here for a list of practical assessment strategies that you can use to prevent students from plagiarising.

References

Ashworth, P., Bannister, P., & Thorne, P. (1997). Guilty in whose eyes? University students' perceptions of cheating and plagiarism in academic work and assessment. Studies in Higher Education, 22(2), 187-203.

Franklyn-Stokes, A., & Newstead, S. E. (1995). Undergraduate cheating: Who does what and why? Studies in Higher Education, 20(2), 159-172.

Macdonald, R., & Carroll, J. (2006). Plagiarism - a complex issue requiring a holistic institutional approach. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 31(2), 233-245.

McCabe, D. L., Treviño, L. K., & Butterfield, K. D. (2001). Cheating in academic institutions: A decade of research. Ethics & Behavior, 11(3), 219-232.

Owens, C., & White, F. A. (2013). A 5-year systematic strategy to reduce plagiarism among first-year psychology university students. Australian Journal of Psychology, 65, 14-21.

Ward, M-H., & Trigwell, K. (2015). Literature review on academic misconduct and plagiarism. DVC Education Portfolio, June.

Wilhoit, S. (1994). Helping students avoid plagiarism. College Teaching, 42(4), 161-164.

Zobel, J., & Hamilton, M. (2002). Managing student plagiarism in large academic departments. Australian Universities Review, 45(2), 23-30.

If you are considering applying for a Vice-Chancellor’s or OLT award for teaching, or student learning next year, now is a good time to check what’s involved and think about your application. Both schemes will run in the first semester next year. Watch for the announcement of dates in February’s Teaching@Sydney. Closing dates for 2016 are likely to be similar to those available for each award in 2015. See the information sheets for each award for the 2015 dates.

Awards are worth $10,000 and provide recognition of the excellence of your teaching or other activities that support student learning. Many of the awards encourage applications from groups. Is there, for example, a curriculum initiative in your area that deserves recognition?

Meanwhile check out the awards and the requirements for each, as well as the resources. You can find examples of successful past applications by asking at the ITL, Level 2 South, Fisher Library. These can prompt you to think about what’s special about your teaching and how to provide evidence of this. Talking with colleagues and mentors or previous award winners is useful, as well as asking for their assistance in critiquing your draft application.

One of the advantages of starting early is that you have time to reflect, to gather extra evidence such as organising peer reviews of your teaching, and checking with referees well in advance whether they are able to support your application. The rewards in writing an application lie not only in the career boost that comes with a successful application but in the purposeful reflection on your teaching, the ideas that occur to you of things to try, and the satisfaction of recording what you have achieved.

The Learning Centre's Summer School Program is now available. During January and February, there is a range of workshops on offer for students. A selection of these include:

• Foundations of Grammar
• Clearer Writing
• Writing a critical review
• Writing in an academic style
• Procrastination and managing time
• Managing literature for coursework

Students can enrol from Monday 4 January. Please do all you can to point your students towards the program. For further information about the full program, visit the website.

Are you interested in exploring ways to support, engage and retain students who are the first in their families to come to university? If so, please register for this workshop in February.

Presenter: Dr Sarah O’Shea, Australian Learning & Teaching Fellow, University of Wollongong 

This presentation reports on research conducted with students who are first in their family (FiF) to attend university. Through interviews and surveys with both learners and their families, a richly descriptive insight into the university experience will be provided. First-in-family learners are characterised by substantially poorer educational outcomes and are at greater risk of attrition than their second or third generation counterparts (ABS, 2013; Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW), 2014; Coates & Ransom, 2011; National Center for Education Statistics [NCES], 2012).

Drawing on a range of research studies including an OLT funded multi-institutional study of FiF students (O’Shea, May, Stone & Delahunty, 2015), this presentation will focus on the ways in which these learners navigated their higher education journey and enacted success within the higher education environment. There will be opportunity for discussion and reflection particularly as this relates to how institutions can: a) respond more effectively to student diversity; b) implement targeted support strategies that account for the learning contexts of this cohort; and c) explore strategies for connecting with families and community of FiF learners.

Program

10.15 – 10.30:   Registration (Tea and Coffee)

10.30 – 10.40:   Acknowledgement of Country; Welcome

10.40 – 11.10:   Background to the research: Who are first-in-family students?

11.10 – 11.30:   Reflections and refreshments (with questions to ponder!)

11.30 – 12.15:   Who or what helps/supports first-in-family students to succeed? What role does ‘family’ play?

12.15 – 12.45:   Strategies / approaches to supporting this cohort (Group work)

12.45 – 1.30:     Lunch and Networking

About Sarah:

In 2015, Sarah was awarded an OLT National Teaching Fellowship to support her work with students who are first in their families to attend university. Broadly, Sarah’s research focuses on student access and participation within the university sector, with particular reference to students from identified equity groups including those from low-SES backgrounds, Indigenous students, mature aged students as well as first-in-family learners.

Registration:

Date: Wednesday 17 February 2016
Time: 10.15am-1.30pm
Venue: University of Sydney, Learning & Teaching Meeting Room 218, Education Portfolio, Level 2, Fisher Library

Register here

Held on 4th November, over 300 staff and students met to discuss the topic of cultural competence. The day kicked off with a keynote by Dr Tim Soutphommasane (Australia's Race Discrimination Commissioner) - see the video here, followed by 25 presentations by university staff and students.

Once again, a highlight was the involvement of six undergraduate Student Ambassadors, who gave a thought-provoking presentation on students' views of cultural competence - check out the video here.

Discussions on Twitter using the hashtag #sydteach15 complemented the face to face conversations, and you can see a summary of the Twitter discussion here.

Participants were invited by the Student Ambassadors to complete an online survey to offer feedback about their experiences at the Colloquium, and 95 responses were received. 85% of the survey respondents agreed that they would aim to implement what they learned at the Colloquium in their teaching; 84% agreed that the Colloquium encouraged collaboration.

For those keen to explore further practical and theoretical resources on teaching cultural competence, have a look at the new online program and join the Cultural Competence and Inclusive Teaching network.
 

Warm congratulations to Dr Elizabeth New, School of Chemistry, Faculty of Science, and the Peer Assisted Learning Programme from the Sydney Medical School, for their successes in the awards given by the Office for Learning and Teaching.  DVCE Professor Pip Pattison welcomed the news of the awards, saying,

I am delighted by this recognition of excellent teaching at the University of Sydney. The excellence and innovation in teaching exemplified by Dr New and the Peer Assisted Learning program provide our students with learning experiences which excite them and prepare them for the future.

Dr Elizabeth New received an Early Career Award for Teaching Excellence.

Dr Elizabeth New is a Lecturer in Inorganic Chemistry at the University of Sydney, with demonstrated excellence in teaching, and a thriving research program into the development of molecular imaging tools for the study of biological systems. Dr New,  an accomplished researcher with a number of research awards, is passionate about sharing and developing a love of chemistry with students by promoting active engagement in the learning process. In particular, her teaching seeks to address rapid changes in the discipline, and the diversity within the student population. Over the past three years, she has made many original and innovative contributions to various aspects of teaching. Most notably, she has led a School-wide redesign of first year teaching, involving the use of weekly video and self-assessment tools and in-class active worksheets, and has significantly redeveloped the second year laboratory curriculum to incorporate a range of research-led investigation exercises. Dr New has led successful applications for a Faculty of Science Learning and Teaching Fellowship, and two University Large Educational Innovation Grants. She is the Royal Australian Chemical Institute Nyholm Youth Lecturer (2014- 2015), and won the University of Sydney Vice Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Teaching (2015).

The Peer Assisted Learning Programme for innovation and flexibility in curricula, learning and teaching, received an Award in the category Programs that Enhance Learning. The team is led by Dr Annette Burgess and includes Associate Professor Kirsten Black, Associate Professor Renata Chapman, Professor Craig Mellis and Associate Professor Chris Roberts.

In 2010, the Peer Assisted Learning (PAL) program was established at the Central Clinical School based at Royal Prince Alfred Hospital, where medical students gain clinical experience. The goal of the PAL program is to develop and sustain medical students' professionalism (knowledge, skills and professional behaviours) through socialising their learning in an authentic, engaging clinical environment. The PAL program consists of four student-centred activities: a teacher training course and innovative peer teaching and assessment opportunities in formative clinical examinations. The activities enable students to take on teaching and assessment roles within the "safety" of their medical school community. Participation has created a dynamic social learning network, engaging hospital clinicians, academics, patients, and all students from Years 1-4. Extensive evaluation and research results published in leading international medical education journals provide evidence of the educational impact of the PAL program. Students feel supported by their medical school community, better prepared for their own summative written and clinical assessments, and better prepared for their future careers as medical practitioners where they will be required to teach and assess their peers. The widening impact of the program is evidenced by the uptake of PAL activities at another five clinical schools and elsewhere.

The recipients received their awards at a ceremony at Parliament House in Canberra on Tuesday 8 December 2015.

In Ideas and concepts being taught may not replace students’ existing ideas (Idea 15), Graham Gibbs reminds us just how important it is to find out what students know about the subject matter before beginning to teach. He argues that it is only through the process of uncovering and challenging misconceptions that students have the room to explore and construct new knowledge (made available through teaching). Read on if you want to learn more.   

Graham Gibbs is one of the UKs most well known advocates of improving university learning and teaching. With his colleagues (Habeshaw & Habeshaw), he was responsible for the very popular '53 Interesting Ideas' books series that have supported countless teachers (new and experienced) navigate their way through tricky classroom and curriculum dilemmas. Gibbs's new blog 53 Powerful Ideas all Teachers Should Know About offers a research summary of key issues.

Two highly ranked higher education journals are celebrating their anniversaries with free access to virtual Special Issues.

Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education marks its 40th anniversary with ten papers on topics that range from rethinking the ways in which we give feedback to aligning assessment with long-term learning.

Studies in Higher Education has selected 12 articles to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Society for Research into Higher Education. The papers are ones which have been significant in 'shaping, theorising, critiquing and pushing the field', and their selection is 'chosen as much for provocation as for representation'. The papers include Simon Barrie's conceptual framework for the teaching and learning of graduate attributes and Keith Trigwell's & Mike Prosser's study of how teachers' conceptions of teaching are related to their approaches to teaching.

As part of the University College London's Connected Curriculum research-based education strategy, proposals are invited from subject-based disciplinary academics, students, and education developers, to be part of an edited book. The book will bring together education enhancement examples in practice that align with Connected Curriculum principles. The selection panel will ensure a wide geographical and disciplinary range of work is included.

Authors are invited to submit a proposal to take one of two approaches, both heavily influenced by practice: either a 5000 word scholarly chapter, or a short 500 word case study vignette succinctly outlining a relevant curriculum enhancement example. While approximately 15 chapter proposals will be accepted, the selection panel will endeavour to include as many short case study vignettes as possible, in this book and in a parallel monograph.

The deadline for 500 word proposals is 10 January 2016. Final contributions will be expected by September 2016.

For further details, including submission templates, please click here.

Lucy Coles (a 3rd year student enrolled in BScience (Adv) / MBBS and Jen Liu (a 2nd year student enrolled in a BInfoTech) – were the lucky recipients of funding to attend and participate in this year's Australasian Conference for Undergraduate Research. Both Jen and Lucy were among the 10 students (among 96 presentations) who received best presentation prizes; Jen for ‘Posture Physiology: Optimising Musical Performance’, and Lucy for ‘Protection from UV-Induced Photoageing by Vitamin D and related compounds’. Below are Jen and Lucy's reflections of the conference.

ACUR allowed me to consider how to effectively communicate research that I would usually only present to others in my discipline. That meant that I needed to present a bigger-picture explanation, with particular emphasis on the background and rationale. Making my research more accessible to students from various disciplines really benefitted my communication skills and I was challenged to view my work from a perspective I wouldn’t usually consider. I found the feedback, questions and interest I received to be especially rewarding. The other thing that struck me at the conference was the potential and need for interdisciplinary research. Other students at the conference were all interested in research in areas they hadn’t studied and I was especially inspired by the exchange of ideas that took place and the applicability of methods from the sciences in the humanities, for example. It showed me that the methods and concepts I have learned in my degree can be applied to problems I would not have considered ‘scientific’ (Lucy).

ACUR gave me a great opportunity to present my summer research project to other students. It was really good to see how other people were interested in my research topic. One girl in particular came up to me after my presentation saying that she didn’t realise bad posture can have such a huge implication for injuries in a musician and that she needs to pay more attention to her posture when playing piano. This feedback really surprised me because it means my presentation was able to educate people on a topic they are interested in. They were able to absorb the information I presented and apply it to their own experiences and will now be able to look at playing an instrument differently (Jen).

Jai Honeybrook Carter from ICT – standing in for Phil Poronnik – attended also.

I was really impressed with the overall calibre and broad scope of the topics being researched by undergraduate students from around the various universities that were represented. As I was heavily involved in one of the research projects that was chosen for an oral presentation at this year's event, it was especially great to see our research gain exposure to, and interest from a wider audience (Jai).

The venue for the 2016 ACUR event has not yet been announced. Check future editions of Teaching @ Sydney for an announcement.
 

When we set up a Blackboard site for a unit of study we generally want to add a place where students can submit their assignments.¹ Often we would also like to add a place where students can interact to discuss course material – the Discussion Board² – just as they might in face-to-face tutorials or practical classes. When Discussion Boards work well they can be the source of significant quality learning for students.³ But how can we get students to engage effectively in online discussions?

1. Write questions that students will want to discuss

To generate effective online discussion, you need to write open-ended questions that ask for students’ opinion and refer to authentic, real-world or discipline practice scenarios, and/or draw on students’ experience, rather than questions that require yes/no or factual answers. For example:

• 'Why do you think that there are not more solar-powered than coal-fired power stations in Australia?’, or, ‘How might you encourage more investment in solar-powered, and less investment in coal-fired, power stations in Australia?’
• ‘How do you think treatment and/or services for patient/clients who suffer from a chronic metabolic disease, such as Type I Glycogen Storage Disease, could be improved?’
• ‘How do you feel about raising the age of issue for a driving license to 19 and keeping the age of issue for a pilot license at 17?’

(Adapted from: Discussion Board Blackboard 9.0, Teaching Effectiveness Program, Teaching and Learning Centre, University of Oregon)

2. Make clear to students in both face-to-face classes and online what you expect in a good post

Specify a word length, style (informal versus formal), and other criteria (e.g., must refer to one of the readings from each week and/or another student’s post). Put a couple of de-identified, genuine examples of a good post on your site for students to read and download, and model how you want students to write in their posts, in your own posts/replies.

3. Make your students’ posts part of your assessment design

That ‘assessment drives learning’ is a truism. If you can design your assessment tasks in such a way that students are required to make, for example, at least five posts (otherwise they fail the unit) in the first five weeks, all of which will help them in their reading/planning for a major assignment/exam. Alternatively, you can give each post a weighting (e.g., 2%, and if students make all posts then they automatically receive 10 marks).

4. Workload

Setting up and facilitating good discussion on Blackboard requires your time. In a recent report on online teaching, discussion boards were nominated by staff “as the most time-consuming … activity, but also the most productive in terms of student learning”.³ To save your time, set aside specific times in your week to read and respond to the discussion board; be specific with students about how often you will post; and pre-empt your discussion questions with announcements in class or online (Adapted from: Discussion Board Blackboard 9.0, Teaching Effectiveness Program, Teaching and Learning Centre, University of Oregon).

^{1 To find out more about how to add and use Blackboard assignments, enrol in a focus workshop.}

^{2 To find out more about how to add and use a Blackboard discussion board, enrol in a focus workshop.}

^{3 Tynan, B. & Ryan, Y. (2012). E-teaching and workload: Report. HERSDA News, 34(3), 26-27.}

Further reading

Discussion Board, Blackboard 9.0, Teaching Effectiveness Program, Teaching and Learning Centre, University of Oregon. Retrieved from http://tep.uoregon.edu/technology/blackboard/docs/discussionboard.pdf

Rova, A. P. (2007). Facilitating online discussions effectively. The Internet and Higher Education, 10(1), 77-88. doi:10.1016/j.iheduc.2006.10.001

Professor Ross Milbourne’s report on the consultation about the successor to the OLT is now available on the OLT website.  It is strongly supportive of the work of the OLT and previous institutes. 

It refers to a forthcoming report by Deloites on the contribution of the Australian higher education to the economy, the challenges faced by the sector over the last decade, and covers the strengths and weaknesses of the OLT before concluding with recommendations about the establishment of the new institute, including the importance of the new director.

Professor Milbourne notes:

The response from the sector has been very positive, reflecting a deeply held conviction of the importance of learning and teaching within the higher education sector. There was also deeply held appreciation for the Government investment in learning and teaching and the importance of this investment in improving learning outcomes.

The Australian higher education sector has a much more diverse student population than most comparable countries. Our student population contains a high proportion of mature-aged and/or part-time, on-line and distance education students, as well as a rich multi-cultural student mix. These students engage with the learning process in different ways, and because there are very different mixes of students between institutions, there are a diversity of institutional approaches to learning and teaching. The sector has been very positive about how the Office for Learning and Teaching has approached this diversity, and have strongly endorsed this as a principle of the Institute.

The sector was strongly supportive of the OLT in facilitating systemic change in learning and teaching, assisting a changed culture within institutions, building capacity of staff, and establishing cross-disciplinary and cross-institutional linkages. Identified gaps included under-capitalised dissemination of funded projects, long time-lines on announcement of funding decisions, and a relative lack of long term evaluations of the effectiveness of programmes. Nevertheless, the overall assessment was extremely positive, with a belief that there had been outstanding outcomes from this Government investment in learning and teaching.

There was general agreement that the Institute needs to be pro-active, future-focused, and lead strategic discussions on learning and teaching in Australia and internationally. There was also agreement that the Institute needs to focus on student-centred learning in a diverse and challenging environment.

Professor Milbourne's report has been referred to the Department of Education and Training. The new National Institute for Learning and Teaching (NILT) is planned to be in operation mid-2016.

Grants

• Congratulations to Dr Kate Thomson and team who have been awarded an extension grant of $30,000 for Ask Charlie: A participatory mobile website resource-based academic professional development.
• Applications have now closed for the 2016 Grant round. The OLT has advised that the outcome of the second grant round for 2015 is expected to be advised by the end of November - beginning of December, 2015.

On Friday 23 October Dr Amani Bell and two of the Sydney Teaching Colloquium student ambassadors, Suji Jeong and Longen Lan, travelled to the University of Queensland for the first national roundtable on students as partners.

The roundtable was an activity of Dr Kelly Matthew's OLT Fellowship Students as partners: reconceptualising the role of students in science degree programme curriculum development. 

For those unfamiliar with the term, students as partners means involving students as genuine contributors to all aspects of university life, and examples range from co-designing curricula to student-led peer mentoring programs. While Kelly's Fellowship has a particular focus on science, it also extends beyond this to all disciplines.

The roundtable participants discussed models, case studies, practical strategies and challenges associated with students as partners initiatives, guided by input from national and international experts, including students.

I took away from the day a paradigm shifting idea that educators are not necessarily the sole developers of curriculum, and that an integrated students as partners approach is a viable alternative to getting students invovled in shaping their university experience. (Longen)

What I learned from the roundtable is that students are grappling with various issues and problems while academics are doing their best to address them. Ultimately students as partners initiatives will empower students to shape their learning experiences. (Suji)

Kelly has proposed a national network of students as partners practitioners and plans a conference at the end of her fellowship in late 2016. For further information and to join the network, please click here.

At the University of Sydney please contact Dr Amani Bell or Dr Tai Peseta for further discussion about students as partners initiatives.

Are you thinking of doing the Graduate Certificate in Educational Studies (Higher Education) in 2016?

If so, then you need to start your application to the Faculty of Education and Social Work now. Applications close on the last working day of November.

The Graduate Certificate in Educational Studies (Higher Education) is a postgraduate award course offered through the Faculty of Education and Social Work. It is an advanced program of study designed to build on your university teaching experience.

The course is primarily designed to introduce university teachers to current principles, practices, debates and research in higher education. Participants develop scholarly, research-led approaches to teaching while engaging in activities and tasks aimed at cultivating critical reflection about higher education.

Course fees for the Graduate Certificate are waived by the University for University of Sydney staff provided you have permanent residency/citizenship status. For further information about the course, visit this website and to begin your application to the course click here.

You are warmly invited to attend the Health Sciences L&T Forum, which is a celebration of the year's achievements in Learning & Teaching. This year’s program includes presentations from our award-winning staff on outstanding teaching, learning and curriculum practices.

This year the forum will also anticipate the future with our move to the Camperdown campus. Our new building, and its teaching spaces, will help us realise our vision for our students and for health care. We will bring the allied health disciplines in our Faculty of Health Sciences together with Nursing and Midwifery in a purpose-built health precinct, close to the new Charles Perkins Centre, and to other faculties such as the Sydney Medical School.

Our ambition is that the new build will help support new ways of working and give us unprecedented opportunities to solve a range of challenging and pressing interdisciplinary health problems. In order to bring these ambitions to life we need to be prepared to teach and research in new spaces and to reimagine education.

The full program and registration details are available on the Intranet.

Date: Tuesday 10 November 2015
Time: 10.00am to 1.00pm
Venue: Cumberland Campus

Please contact Tina Barclay with any queries. 
 

The program for ALASI is now available, and is looking very good! Thanks in advance to all those involved.

Keynotes will kick off the program each morning. Dr Lyn Alderman from QUT will offer an insight into a whole-of-institution approach to analytics, and Professor Peter Reimann from Sydney will speak on 'There is nothing as practical as theory: Connecting learning analytics to learning research'. 

The remainder of each day will be filled with interactive sessions, hands-on workshops, and panels, scheduled in parallel. We have streamed sessions to cater for those interested in innovative teaching, technology topics, and analytics at the institutional level. Take a look and see which options you are keen on.

We are looking forward to hosting colleagues from a range of Australian and NZ universities at Sydney for ALASI. To help us with our planning, please register sooner rather than later.

And we’re also pleased to announce that ALASI will be preceded by a free workshop Learning analytics and retention: a framework for advancement on Wednesday 25 November, 12-5pm. This interactive workshop will report findings from the recently released OLT-commissioned report, and provide interactive sessions aimed at building institutional capacity to address issues such as retention. Take a look at the workshop program and register here.

Follow along on Twitter: #alasi2015 @sydneyanalytics

In Idea 3 Transferable skills rarely transfer, Graham Gibbs offers an account about how to design university learning experiences (and curriculum) that take transferability seriously. Unsurprisingly, his focus is on the design of authentic assessment. Read on if you want to learn more.   

Graham Gibbs is one of the UKs most well known advocates of improving university learning and teaching. With his colleagues (Habeshaw & Habeshaw), he was responsible for the very popular '53 Interesting Ideas' books series that have supported countless teachers (new and experienced) navigate their way through tricky classroom and curriculum dilemmas. Gibbs's new blog 53 Powerful Ideas all Teachers Should Know About offers a research summary of key issues.

Associate Professor Simon Barrie is leaving the University at the end of October to take up the position of Pro Vice-Chancellor (Learning Transformations) at Western Sydney University.

In Simon's 20 years at the university, he has made many friends and influenced the thinking of even more. His major contributions have been in leadership as Director, Teaching and Learning since 2010; in curriculum renewal where he has built on his internationally recognised research on graduate attributes; in research more broadly through receipt of five major external competitive grants totalling over $1million; in quality assurance/enhancement through the development and implementation of the Unit of Study Evaluation system and its links with the Student Course Experience Questionnaire; in leading developments with the Associate Deans (Learning and Teaching/Education) such as the faculty-based teaching compacts; and more recently supporting university-wide curriculum initiatives related to cultural competence.

Simon is known internationally for his work on quality assurance and graduate attributes. He is regularly invited to universities in Europe, Canada and Asia to act as an international advisor and/or reference group member for curriculum renewal, and research projects focused on graduate learning outcomes.

Simon's academic background is in Speech Pathology from Western Australia, but at Sydney he quickly revealed his potential as both a teacher and as an academic developer when he was appointed as a lecturer to the then Centre for Teaching and Learning in the mid 1990s under the directorship of Jackie Lublin. His humour and quick thinking, his ability to motivate others through his own enthusiasm, his seemingly never-ending source of constructive ideas, and his project management skills have made him a much valued colleague to many staff in the university. He plans to maintain his links with Sydney through his leadership of the 2015-2017 OLT project on reframing the PhD.

The University will be hosting the traditional farewell for Simon on 22nd October. We thank Simon for all he has contributed and wish him well in his new and challenging position. He will be dearly missed.

This invitation has been written by Dr Karen Scott, Senior Lecturer in Medical Education at The Children's Hospital at Westmead Clinical School, Sydney Medical School.

Do you use mobile devices for teaching in health practice settings?

If YES, then you are invited to participate in a University of Sydney Faculties of Health study investigating innovative uses of mobile learning in health practice settings. If you agree to participate, then we will ask you ten initial questions in an online survey.

The online survey should take you about five minutes to complete. We may then email you to request further details via face to face, phone or email interview that, if you agree, would take about 20-30 minutes, at a time convenient for you.

Our aim is to create a shareable, flexible resource to provide case examples and guidance on mobile learning for those teaching in a range of health professions and health settings. The case examples will be showcased on a project website and in journal publications, conference presentations and workshops.

Declining to participate will not affect any aspect of your employment or relationship with the University and potential participants can withdraw at any time. Please read our Participant Information Statement for potential participants.

Thank you for taking the time to consider our study. If you would like further information, then please contact Dr Karen Scott.

The Education Portfolio is hosting the 5th International Academic Identities Conference at The University of Sydney, 29 June - 1 July, 2016. The Sydney conference builds on previous conferences at Lancaster, Strathclyde, Auckland and Durham universities, and will explore the theme Academic life in the measured university: pleasures, paradoxes and politics.  While the theme points most obviously to the imposition of measures upon those who labour in the university – both staff and students – it also examines the ways the university itself (and the academic practices it encourages) has become transformed by measurement. It asks whether the university is still an environment for developing engaged, disciplined, and critical citizens who take responsibility for the world. In one sense, the ‘measured university’ implies a state of caution, a sense of restraint, blandness, even automation. In another, it establishes a new rationality, offering something of a certainty that academic life and decision-making proceeds on the basis of ‘evidence’. The theme opens up questions about whether the university is realizing and standing up for its distinctive potential under the pervasive conditions of measurement. What can be done to act both with, and against, the drift, scale, and reach of the measured university? Is it possible (or even desirable) to redirect the measured university to different ends? If so, what might those ends be and how shall we go about it?

Since the conference is located in Australia’s first university, we are especially committed to surfacing Indigenous peoples’ experiences and perspectives of academic life. Not only that, we are interested in how the measured university might be more productively understood, theorized, and engaged with in the intersections offered by Indigenous and western knowledge systems.

We are also pleased to announce three conference keynotes:

• Associate Professor Ruth Barcan, Department of Gender and Cultural Studies, The University of Sydney
• Professor Gert Biesta, Department of Education, Brunel University
• Dr Julie Rowlands, School of Education, Deakin University

We welcome submissions - empirical, theoretical, and creative - that critically interrogate the full spectrum of academic identities, activities, practices and contexts that comprise the measured university. While this includes describing how the gaze of measurement impacts on the identities of academics, students, universities, and the practices they participate in, we are equally interested in proposals that reclaim the possibilities of measurement or that transcend ideas about the measured university.

The journal Higher Education Research & Development (HERD) will run a parallel Special Issue (SI) dedicated to the theme of the conference to be published in 2017. Further information is available at the conference website.
 
We look forward to receiving your conference submissions - due Friday 15 January 2016 - and to welcoming you to Sydney and to what we hope will be a rich and provocative conference. Visit the conference website for additional information.

The Education Portfolio is hosting a pit-stop visit by Emeritus Professor Ronald Barnett. The corpus of Barnett's academic work has focused on advancing a social philosophy of the university. Recently, he has begun to sketch out an idea of the ecological university. His 22 books include The Idea of Higher Education, The Limits of Competence, Realizing the University in an age of supercomplexity, Beyond All Reason: Living with Ideology in the University and A Will to Learn: Being a Student in an Age of Uncertainty. He is currently writing a trilogy of books on comprehending the university, the first two volumes have recently been published Being a University (2011) and Imagining the University (2013); the third volume, Understanding the University: Institutions, Idea(s), Possibilities, is currently in press.

For his seminar, Professor Barnett will focus on the ideas from his latest book. Following the presentation, there will be opportunities for questions. We encourage anyone who is conducting, or has conducted research into areas inspired by his work to attend.

Date: Tuesday 24 November, 2015
Time: 1.45pm-3.30pm (and then 3.45pm-4.45pm)
Venue: Meeting Room 250, Level 2 South, Fisher Library F03

To register, click here

On Friday 16 October please join us for an #edtech talk by Simon McIntyre.

This presentation will explore the personalised learning strategies adopted within two iterations of a massive open online course - Learning to Teach Online. The standard Coursera platform was augmented with custom technology designed in-house, enabling the development of a more flexible course design. This allowed participants to either undertake a traditional linear learning pathway (week-by-week) curriculum, or a flexible, but scaffolded, self-directed path, choosing which content, activities and assignments they thought relevant to their own needs.

This presentation will discuss the challenges that were faced in the design and implementation of the curriculum, explore some data about how participants took part, and will outline how the lessons learned from the first MOOC in 2014 were applied in the second offering in mid 2015.

Simon McIntyre is the Director of Learning and Innovation at UNSW | Art & Design, and an Apple Distinguished Educator. After developing and teaching online courses in art and design for several years, he has helped many other academics design and teach online through designing and convening a range of award winning academic development programs. He is recognised internationally for his pioneering learning and teaching approaches for fully online and blended education across several disciplines.

Simon’s research is on the development of new online pedagogies to evolve education into a globally networked practice. His recent work explores the potential of mobile technologies and open learning both on and off-campus. He has led the design and creation of a range of open education resources such as numerous educational videos, iTunes U content, and an award winning interactive iBook, which is currently featured as an exemplar on Apple Education’s US website.

Date: Friday 16 October
Time: 12.00pm-1.00pm
Register: Click here

Citations for Outstanding Contributions to Student Learning awarded by the OLT (Office for Learning and Teaching) offer national recognition. They recognise and reward the diversity of contributions made by individuals and teams to the quality of student learning. Up to 150 Citations, valued at $10,000 each, are awarded to academic, general and sessional staff, and institutional associates who have made significant contributions to student learning. The University of Sydney can make up to six nominations in 2016. Citations to be nominated by the University will be chosen in Semester 1, 2016.

A workshop for those interested in applying for a Citation in 2016 will be held on Thursday 15 October, 2015, 10.30-12.00 noon. While the internal closing date for the internal selection process is not until mid semester 1, 2016 attending the workshop will enable you to find out and begin thinking about what's involved and start work early on an application if you decide to apply.

Unlike the Vice Chancellor's and OLT Teaching Excellence Awards, the focus of the applications is on just one of the four criteria used for the awards:

• Approaches to teaching and the support of learning that influence, motivate and inspire students to learn;
• Development of curricula, resources or services that reflect a command of the field;
• Evaluation practices that bring about improvements in teaching and learning; or
• Innovation, leadership or scholarship that has influenced and enhanced learning and teaching and/or the student experience.

Applications will be judged on the extent to which they show evidence of evaluation, innovation, leadership and scholarship in the written statement that the contribution has:

• Influenced student learning, student engagement or the overall student experience
• Gained recognition from fellow staff, the institution, and/or the broader community
• Been sustained for a period of no less than three years (two years for early career).

Because a high level of evidence is required for a successful application, those who are successful will usually be able to support their application by drawing on their success in faculty and/or university awards. If you have a record of recognition and a passion for supporting student learning, register for the workshop and come to find out what's involved. 

Further support in preparing applications is given to those who are chosen by the University to be nominated for Citations to the OLT.

Congratulations to the University of Sydney nominees selected to receive a 2015 Citation for Outstanding Contributions to Student Learning. The Citations awarded by the OLT (Office for Teaching and Learning) provide national recognition. They recognise and reward the diversity of contributions made by individuals and teams to the quality of student learning.

DVC Education, Professor Pip Pattison expressed her warmest congratulations to Associate Professors Jaime Gongora and Alyson Simpson who received their Citations at a sunny ceremony at the MCA on Friday 18th September.

“I am delighted to see this recognition of the University’s learning and teaching at the national level,” said Professor Pattison. “Innovation and experimentation in teaching leads to exciting and creative and productive experiences for students which have long-lasting effects on their learning and their lives."

Associate Professor Jaime Gongora was recognised for innovatively embedding cultural competence into the veterinary curriculum and promoting an environment that celebrates Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures. Jaime recognises the combined nature of the achievements and has asked that the recognition accorded to his work should also be credited to the support of his family, Faculty of Veterinary Science Dean Professor Rosanne Taylor, DVC-ISS Professor Shane Houston and others who have contributed and mentored him in different ways.

Associate Professor Alyson Simpson was recognised for her passionate commitment to dialogic pedagogy that inspires students as literacy educators learning to teach critically and creatively with children's literature. Her conviction that early career teachers need to build a robust identity to support their future professional capacity, lead her to explore interactive pedagogies that support student autonomy and agentive classroom planning. Alyson is grateful to those who inspired her love for children's literature including her mother and Maurice Saxby.

Read more about how Jaime and Alyson view their work and Citations.

Sydney is hosting the Australian Learning Analytics Summer Institute (ALASI) this year on the 26-27 November 2015. 

We've received a record number of proposals, and the sessions promise to be interactive and of broad interest. Keynotes will kick off the program each morning. Dr Lyn Alderman from QUT will give us insight into a whole-of-institution approach to analytics, and Professor Peter Reimann from Sydney will speak on There is nothing as practical as theory: Connecting learning analytics to learning research. Keynote bios and abstracts are now available on the webpage. 

It would be great to have a good contingent of University of Sydney delegates present as we welcome visiting colleagues from institutions across Australia and NZ. Please note that the earlybird registration price ends 30 October.

Follow along on Twitter: #alasi2015 @sydneyanalytics

You are warmly invited to join your colleagues at the 2015 Sydney Teaching Colloquium on Wednesday 4 November. The program is now available, and you’ll see we have a day filled with interesting presentations and conversations about cultural competence.

Highlights include:

• Our keynote speaker Dr Tim Soutphommasane, Race Discrimination Commissioner
• Finding out what’s happening about cultural competence at many levels - the whole university, faculties and units of study
• A panel on industry and alumni perspectives of cultural competence
• Hearing from our six Student Ambassadors about their views of cultural competence and the colloquium
• A symposium that gives you an opportunity to participate in a dialogue on how to create a learning environment for cultural competence
• Presentations on assessing and giving feedback on students' cultural competence

The Colloquium is free for staff and students, but registration is essential. Those on Twitter can follow the account @SydTeachColloq or use  #sydteach15 to contribute to the conversation.

We look forward to seeing you at the Colloquium.

In Idea 33 'Motivating students is not magic', Graham Gibbs invites Professor Emeritus Marilla D. Svinicki, University of Texas at Austin to address a very common concern among university teachers about what motivates students to learn. The first big caution Svinicki offers is this: "teachers are NOT the main source of motivation for students. We just don't have THAT much control over students lives". Read on if you want to learn more.   

Graham Gibbs is one of the UKs most well known advocates of improving university learning and teaching. With his colleagues (Habeshaw & Habeshaw), he was responsible for the very popular '53 Interesting Ideas' books series that have supported countless teachers (new and experienced) navigate their way through tricky classroom and curriculum dilemmas. Gibbs's new blog 53 Powerful Ideas all Teachers Should Know About offers a research summary of key issues.

The Graduate Certificate in Educational Studies (Higher Education) is a postgraduate award course offered through the Faculty of Education and Social Work and taught by staff in the Education Portfolio. It is an advanced program of study building on candidates' university teaching experience.

Research shows that staff who complete the Graduate Certificate have more satisfied students and are more likely to win teaching awards.

Graduates also say that the course gives them 'permission' and the 'space' to reflect on and enhance their teaching practice.

The course consists of four core units of study (chosen from five options) over two semesters. Entry requirements are that intending participants in the course must be engaged in university teaching during the year they undertake the program.

Course fees for the Graduate Certificate are waived by the University for University of Sydney staff, provided staff have permanent residency/citizenship status. To avoid paying course fees you will need to provide certified copies of evidence of your employment at the University; this can include a copy of your staff ID card or a copy of your pay slip. Please note that there is no mid-year intake.

For further information about the course, visit this website and to begin your application to the course click here.

Congratulations to students Lucy Coles and Jen Liu - the inaugural recipients of the 2015 Undergraduate Research Conference Support Scheme (URCSS). Funded by the Institute for Teaching and Learning, the scheme supports two Sydney undergraduate students (and their academic supervisors) to present their research at the Australasian Conference for Undergraduate Research (ACUR) which this year, will be at The University of Western Australia from 29-30 September.

There were over 20 applications for the URCSS, and both applications stood out largely because of the students' research initiative. Lucy is a third year Bachelor Science (Adv)/MBBS student enrolled in the Talented Student Program undertaking research with Professor Rebecca Mason in Physiology on ultraviolet radiation, and Jen is in the second year of a Bachelor of Information Technology degree working with Professor Phillip Poronnik on a project related to the posture of musicians - a collaboration with the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, the ICT Innovation Lab (in particular, with Jai Honeybrook-Carter) which is an initiative of the Charles Perkins Centre research node on Health and Creativity.

Jen writes:

One of the reasons I am excited to attend this conference in particular is the diversity of disciplines represented. I believe I will meet fellow students who might give me interesting ideas for ways in which the project could be extended. Posture and other physical parameters are not restricted to musicians so I hope I might find other students in different disciplines with whom I can collaborate.

Lucy writes:

Attending ACUR will allow me to learn about the process of conference attendance outside of the more daunting context of subject-specific conferneces. I believe that the combination of humanities and sciences at ACUR will broaden my interests in many fields of study and hopefully provide inspiration for more innovative wayss to conduct research.

Our warmest congratulations to Jen and Lucy, and we look forward to reporting on their experiences of the ACUR conference in a future edition of Teaching@Sydney.
 

The Vice-Chancellor's Award for Outstanding and Innovative Contributions to our Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Strategy seeks to promote, recognise and reward outstanding and innovative contributions to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander strategy at the University of Sydney. It is awarded by the Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Indigenous Strategy and Services), and is open to Indigenous and non-Indigenous staff of the University. Nominees must demonstrate an outstanding contribution to the University’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander strategy. The award is for the sum of $10,000. Applications close Monday 14 September. Click here for information on the award and to apply. 

The Office for Learning and Teaching (OLT) will continue business as usual until 30 June 2016, after which its responsibilities will be transferred to a new institute from July 2016. Information about the Awards and Citations for 2016 is expected shortly and will be posted as soon as it is available. Fellowship applications for 2016 are now open and information about the Grants round for 2016 is given in an item above.

Resources which result from OLT projects are regularly posted on the OTL website.

Learning and Teaching Across Cultures is just one of the latest resources available from the OLT as the result of a recently completed project. 

Other resources include two network reports: the National Forestry Education Network and the Journalism, Media & Communication Network and Defying the Odds: Promoting Success for Refugee Background and Non-English Speaking Background (NESB) First-Year Students Through Peer Support and Tourism, Hospitality and Events Learning and Teaching Academic Standards.

These and the many other reports on the OLT website are useful resources for teaching. Anyone preparing an application for an OLT or Education Innovation grant should check what's available through the OLT resource library.

If you’re interested in what’s happening in the analytics space at Sydney, follow along! 

Follow @sydneyanalytics

 

The ascilite Learning Analytics Special Interest Group (SIG) has launched its inaugural Awards for Excellence in Learning Analytics.

Details of the Awards can be found via this link. The Awards program aims to recognise excellence in the practical application of learning analytics to enhance learning and teaching, and provides cash prizes for finalists to support travel to this year’s ascilite conference in Perth (where finalists will present on their submissions).

This is just a reminder that Awards submissions close on Friday 11 September. Finalists will be announced on Monday 5 October. 

To enter click here.

On Friday 18 September please join us for #edtech talks from Dr James Edwards and Catherine Smyth.

Dr James Edwards will talk about the development, challenges and future direction of the 'onthewards’ website. In his role as Director of Prevocational Education and Training, and primary supervisor for over 100 junior doctors, James recognised a gap between the transition from medical school to internship with many junior doctors feeling unprepared for working on the wards. This gap, coupled with an interest in the flipped classroom model of teaching and developing resources to support asynchronous learning led him to found www.onthewards.org for early career doctors in 2014. This is an example of a Free open access medical education (FOAM) website that features podcasts, blogs and videos that address what junior doctors will face whilst working on the wards. FOAM is based on the ethos of open sharing and collaboration of resources with attribution and recognition of the work of others. 

James is a Senior Staff Specialist in Emergency Medicine and the Deputy Director of Emergency Department at Royal Prince Alfred Hospital (RPAH). He is the current Clinical Chair of the NSW Prevocational Training Council and Acting Medical Director at the Health Education and Training Institute. In the Sydney University Medical Program, he chairs the Pre-internship committee.

Catherine Smyth is a lecturer in Human Society and Its Ennvironment (HSIE) K-6 primary curriculum in the Faculty of Education and Social Work. Her teaching and research focuses on primary teachers’ historical understanding and the way technology can be used to build, organize and communicate knowledge. In this presentation, Catherine talks about how she uses ‘Scoop.it’ - a part content curation tool and part social network - to share ideas and connect with her students during their degree and after they graduate. Catherine curates 14 Scoop.it topics, which have attracted over 45,000 views. She will discuss how an inquiry-based assessment task, where students create their own Scoop.it sites, can provide an opportunity for participation in, and contribution to, an online community of practice.

Date: Friday 18 September
Time: 12-1pm

Register: Click here

Sydney is hosting the Australian Learning Analytics Summer Institute (ALASI) on Thursday 26 and Friday 27 November 2015.

ALASI gathers practitioners and researchers in analytics across Australian universities to engage in an interactive program comprised of mostly workshops, tutorials, and panels. There will be two keynote speakers to provoke thought and discussion – our own Professor Peter Reimann and Dr Lyn Alderman from QUT.

Come along! Early bird registration opens Friday 28 August.

Proposal submissions are due Friday 2 October.

All the details are on the ALASI 2015 webpage.

We hope to see you there!

The Office for Learning and Teaching has announced that there will be one grant round only for the 2016 year. It will cover Innovation and Development Grants and Strategic Priority Commissioned Grants. Seed grants and extension grants and EOIs will not be offered in 2016.

The closing date for the 2016 round for applications to be submitted to the OLT is Monday 2 November 2015. The closing date for internal submission has yet to be determined but is likely to be 14th October. The date will be posted on the ITL website as soon as it is available. The institutional deadline is required because the university must notify the OLT of all pending applications, and applications have to be checked before letters of support can be issued by the DVCE.

Because the time frame is short, If you are interested in applying for a grant you should start now to:

• download and read the information and nomination instructions
• consider whether your project fits one of the priority areas
• start planning your application
• register for the workshop on Wednesday 16th September 10am-12noon
• contact potential partners and start assembling your team
• attend the workshop with as much of a plan for the project as you can and with your questions.

The 2016 Priority areas for the Innovation and Development Grants are:

• Academic standards
• Assessing equivalence of qualifications and learning outcomes
• Deisgning learning for the future
• Assessment and promotion of student learning
• Employability skills
• Improving institutional pathways across higher education
• Improving access to and outcomes in higher education for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people
• The contemporary PhD

The 2016 Priority areas for the Strategic Commissioned Grants are:

• The changing role of the academic
• Scaling up ansd ensuring quality of higher education in an era of massification
• Academic integrity and good practice in assessment

For further information which is essential to follow if you plan to apply click here.

The call for OLT Fellowships for 2016 is also open, and applications close on Monday 2 February 2016.

Registrations are now open for the Sydney Teaching Colloquium which will be held on Wednesday 4th November, and hosted by the Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Education) Professor Pip Pattison. With the theme of 'Cultural competence is everyone's business', the Colloquium considers how we might meet the challenge of embedding cultural competence in teaching and curriculum. You'll hear from students, staff and industry, and also from our keynote speaker, Dr Tim Soutphommasane, Australia's Race Discrimination Commissioner.

At this year's event, you can:

• learn more about assessing and giving feedback on students' cultural competence
• hear what the professions really want from our graduates
• interact with staff who are faciltiating learning in culturally diverse groups
• find out what this year’s Student Ambassadors think about cultural competence

Register here

If you're on Twitter, you can follow the conversation @SydTeachColloq and #sydteach15

 

The pick this month from Graham Gibb's blog is Idea 31 - that 'Much learning is acquired by doing, but seldom only by doing'. Gibbs describes learning from experience as a multi-cycle phenomenon, involving a continuous cycle of theory, planning, doing and reflection - do you agree?

Graham Gibbs is one of the UK's most well known advocates of improving university learning and teaching. With his colleagues (Habeshaw & Habeshaw), he was responsible for the very popular '53 Interesting Ideas' books series that have supported countless teachers (new and experienced) navigate their way through tricky classroom and curriculum dilemmas. Gibbs's new blog 53 Powerful Ideas all Teachers Should Know About offers a research summary of key issues.

Crossing the borders: new frontiers for academic integrity is the title of the 7th Asia Pacific Conference on Educational Integrity, the APFEI biennial conference  which will be hosted this year hosted by Charles Sturt University, 16-18 November 2015.

It is more urgent than ever that new educational approaches to academic integrity be imagined, so that new frontiers and opportunities for teaching and learning can minimise risk and ensure our academic standards. In Australia, for instance, the Tertiary Education and Quality and Standards Agency (TEQSA) requires that Higher Education providers have policies and processes in place to demonstrate academic quality assurance. Within these guidelines, providers must demonstrate evidence of effective implementation of systematic processes at all levels to maintain academic integrity and to prevent misconduct. The conference focus on the new frontiers of academic integrity is therefore extremely topical, as universities are increasingly pressured to show evidence of their management and promotion of academic integrity.

In keeping with the conference theme of new frontiers, this is the first time that an APFEI conference will be held in rural Australia rather than in a major city. Additionally, many opportunities will be provided for online participation by distance or transnational delegates. 

For more visit: www.7apcei.com

Leading Learning and the Scholarship of Change is the theme of the 12th annual conference of the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning which will take place from 27-30 October 2015 in Melbourne, Australia. The conference will be co-hosted by Monash University and RMIT University and held at RMIT University, located in the central business district of Melbourne. At this major international conference, you will have the opportunity to hear from, and interact with, scholars of teaching and learning from around the world. The conference theme, Leading Learning and the Scholarship of Change, will explore how teaching staff and students in universities can lead quality learning and teaching practice as we move inevitably towards more changes in higher education. You will be able to interact with colleagues and build networks that will enable you to participate actively in the distributed leadership of the academy.

For more visit: http://www.issotl2015.com.au/

The  2015 annual Australian Association for Research in Education (AARE) Conference will be held in Fremantle at the University of Notre Dame Australia. The AARE conference brings together researchers from across the world, as well as Australia, who work in diverse educational fields. The Association’s wide range of Special Interest Groups (SIGs) gives a sense of this diversity. The conference is a space within which both well established and early career academics can find a forum to provoke debate, stimulate discussion, offer new ideas and encourage the dissemination of research findings. Alongside the main conference, opportunities are also provided to meet journal editors and book publishers, to participate in workshops and to develop SIG initiatives.

For more visit: www.aareconference.com.au

If you supervise doctoral students, or you are one yourself, you may be interested in a new MOOC 'How to survive your PhD'. It's intended mainly for students, but also for supervisors and families. You can watch a video trailer for the MOOC here . The MOOC starts on August 26th, and runs for 10 weeks, with two hours per week anticipated study time.

Between one-quarter and one-third of all research students never finish their degree. The PhD is an emotional journey as much as it is an intellectual one.  The MOOC will help participants understand the common emotional experiences of research students and why they tend to have emotional issues in common; create strategies and approaches to help research students cope with the emotional challenges of research study; and will help academics and prospective academics become more effective research supervisors.

By directly addressing the emotional issues, and by helping participants see the connections between emotional resilience and success, this course aims to help create a more supportive academic environment, where students can do their best research work.

If you are interested in further details, the MOOC's creator, Dr Inger Mewburn, describes the process of creating the MOOC in this blog post.

There's a new feature in the unit of study survey (USS) system that allows unit of study coordinators to give permission to other staff members to either view USS results (e.g. for Semester 1 surveys recently completed), and/or track response rates whilst a survey is open (e.g. for upcoming intensive or Semester 2 surveys).

This might be helpful for those who have a co-coordinator, or that wish to share information with other teachers contributing to the unit e.g. lecturers, tutors, demonstrators.

To enable this, the coordinator needs to:

1. Go to the USS Reports webpage and login; THEN
2. (a) Click on the share icon (image) to the right of the unit name in the list of reports, OR
   (b) Click on the share icon (image) in the top right collection of icons when they have a report open; THEN
3. Fill in the information on the box that pops up (image).

To share quantitative results tick 'report', to share qualitative results tick 'comment', and to share the tracking of response rates whilst a survey is open tick 'tracking'.

To view reports the staff member given permission/s needs to login here.

To view response tracking the staff member given permission needs to login here.

If you have any queries or issues with this feature, please contact Dr Brad Ridout who is the Surveys Officer in the ITL via email or 9351 3725.
 

In August, we have two #edtech talks. 

On Friday 21st August , the STELTH (Sydney Technology Enhanced Learning & Teaching in Health) group will host an #edtech session, with Dr Vanessa Hughes and Dr Kate Edwards. 

Dr. Vanessa Hughes, Sydney Nursing School will speak about Smart Sparrow: Using learning analytics to measure student engagement in case based learning. Vanessa is a Senior Lecturer in Bioscience in the Faculty of Nursing and Midwifery. She is an early adopter of technology and has received several teaching awards recognizing her efforts in using technology to foster deeper learning and student engagement. In her talk, Vanessa will discuss how using Smart Sparrow has enabled her to construct online case based learning modules that enable nursing students to connect bioscience theory with clinical practice. She will discuss how learning analytics have helped her to understand her students learning behavior and how this has enabled her to improve her teaching and provide more meaningful formative feedback to her students.  

Dr Kate Edwards, Faculty of Health Sciences will present on The use of video rubrics for assessor training. Kate is a Senior Lecturer in Exercise Physiology in the Faculty of Health Sciences. In 2014 she won the FHS Early Career Teaching Award for her work leading a large cohort in the fundamentals of exercise science unit. In particular she has developed a subject specific, online Excel course and integrated Excel worksheets for the blending of software skills in basic science. In this talk, she will discuss the innovative development of multimedia rubrics for practical skills assessments. This cutting edge work combines media use to improve teaching and moderation in multi-examiner settings, as well as improving tools for student feedback.

Date: Friday 21 August
Time: 12-1pm

To register click here

On Friday 28 August, Professor Eric Tsui presents Blended Learning and MOOCs: PolyU's Journey.

This talk will outline the blended learning efforts, emergence and current development of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). In particular, the impact on higher education, on personal learning, and various ways to sustain these efforts will be discussed. In May 2014, HKPolyUX became a contributing member of MIT's edX platform. This presentation will also outline PolyU's preparation and journey to MOOCs. Separately and in addition to the above, PolyU is also part of the consortium of HK universities which have been awarded a large theme-based grant by the University Grants Committee (UGC) HK to develop a mega-MOOC platform called KEEP and PolyU's role is to develop a personalisation engine to recommend courses to learners on the KEEP platform.

Appointed as the Professor of Knowledge Management at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University under the President’s Distinguished Professionals Scheme in September 2002, Professor Tsui joined the university as a full time staff member in March 2005. Eric is Vice President of the Hong Kong Knowledge Management Society, an honorary advisor on Knowledge Management to the Hong Kong Police College and the Efficiency Unit, and a member on IT Technical Advisory Sub-Committee in the Hong Kong Hospital Authority. Prior to joining the University, Professor Tsui had several industry roles, including Chief Research Officer, Asia Pacific for Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC) as well as Innovation Manager at Australian Mutual Provident (AMP) and Maybank in Malaysia. PRofessor Tsui has received several teaching awards, and in 2015 was rated by Terrapinn (Singapore) as one of the Top 50 Influencers in Education in the Asia Pacific.

Date: Friday 28 August
Time: 12-1pm

To register click here
 

Please pass on this opportunity to your students - it's paid work and great experience.

The Sydney Teaching Colloquium (STC) is one of the biggest events on the University’s teaching and learning calendar. Attended by over 300 staff, the STC is a forum for sharing ideas and practices, learning about research, and finding collaborators interested in improving teaching, learning and curriculum at the University

The Colloquium is now in its fifth year. This year, the STC will be held on Wednesday 4th November in the Charles Perkins Centre. We invite applications from currently-enrolled undergraduate students to participate in the colloquium as Student Ambassadors. These are paid positions, and we are seeking to appoint six students as Ambassadors.

For more information please click here
 

Nearly four years since the first MOOCs (massive open online courses) were offered by Stanford University, MOOCs are now offered by hundreds of top universities, to tens of millions of learners worldwide. MOOCs are no longer an experiment: the learning, reach, and value they offer are now a reality.

Professor Pip Pattison, Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Education) will be introducing Daphne Koller, the Co-Founder and President of Coursera, who will discuss how MOOCs present opportunities for open-ended projects, intercultural learner interactions, and collaborative learning.

Professor Koller will also provide an insight to MOOCs learning analytics and showcase the transformative impact that can be derived from providing millions of people with access to the world’s best education.

About the speaker

Daphne Koller is the President and co-founder of Coursera, a social entrepreneurship company that works with the best universities to connect anyone around the world with the best education, for free. Koller was recognized as one of Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People for 2012, Newsweek’s top 10 most important people in 2010, Huffington Post's 100 Game Changers for 2010, and more. Prior to founding Coursera, Koller was the Rajeev Motwani Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University, where she served on the faculty for 18 years. In her research life, she worked in the area of machine learning and probabilistic modeling, with applications to systems biology and personalized medicine. She is the recipient of many awards, which include the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, the ACM/Infosys award, and membership in the US National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is also an award winning teacher, who pioneered in her Stanford class many of the ideas that underlie the Coursera user experience. She received her BSc and MSc from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and her PhD from Stanford in 1994.

Date: Wednesday 12 August
Time: 4.30pm - 5.30pm

For further details, and to register click here
 

The OLT has recently announced the successful Round 1, 2015 grants and the 2015 Fellows. DVC Education, Professor Pip Pattison announced the successes to the University.

Warmest congratulations to:

Adam Bridgeman for his National Teaching Fellowship:
Personalising learning using diagnostic and success data for large cohorts

The Fellowship, Adam says, will build on the successful approach to personalising the first year experience developed in Chemistry and the Faculty of Science at Sydney and take the next step in the pedagogy of transition using technology-enabled learning, learning analytics and diagnostic testing. Adam’s awareness that the first year experience is pivotal for student success, retention and progression as it shapes the approaches to learning that students adopt and attitudes towards the disciplines, already has had an impact in the Faculty of Science. He notes:  Technology-enabled teaching and support has the potential through the practical implementation of learning analytics to individualise learning and personalise the student experience. The Fellowship program will build on and expand the transition framework through the facilitation of approaches that embrace and share expertise in technology and the use of data.

Warmest congratulations to the University of Sydney successful applicants for grants.

Now that the OLT grants are Category One, they are even more highly sought after and contested. Nine grants were awarded this round, two of them to Sydney.  

Simon Barrie, with Tai Peseta, Keith Trigwell and Peter McCallum and team for their grant of $349 000:
Reframing the PhD for Australia's future universities

Tai Peseta comments on how the project reflects University of Sydney priorities.

We know from the release of the first strategy paper on research that the University is keen for a conversation about the nature of the PhD as well as the learning experiences which comprise it. Our project started from a concern we had about the quality of teaching preparation for PhD candidates. As we began to explore this, we realised that there are already innovative models of teaching preparation in the PhD across the world. We didn’t feel the need to add to that repertoire of strategies. Instead, we wanted to focus on how we might use the existing learning contexts in the PhD – like supervision, disciplinary communities, even the research project and thesis itself – to support the work of ‘teaching preparation’ – and vice versa. For us, the potentially exciting element of the project is that it could point to a radically different PhD learning experience, at Sydney and elsewhere.

Gabrielle Russell-Mundine and Joseph Cavanagh of the NCC and their team for a grant of $435,000:
An interdisciplinary model and resources for culturally competent service learning in Aboriginal community controlled organisations

Gabrielle welcomes the initiatives which mean that: The University of Sydney is building opportunities for students to have a unique experience of working with Aboriginal peoples and their communities. We have learnt from many Aboriginal peoples and their communities that this necessitates student openness to appreciate that there are many ways of knowing, being and doing that are different to their own. Our aim is to make sure that all who participate in this project will gain many learning outcomes that they will value throughout their lives. This project will assist students and staff to build their cultural competence skills on their life long journey towards being a globally effective and culturally safe practitioner and will transform the service learning experience by developing a new way of building interdisciplinary partnerships between Aboriginal industry partners and the University.

Read more about the fellowship and grant projects here.

Cultural Competence is everyone's business

For our students and graduates to ‘work productively, collaboratively and openly in diverse groups and across cultural boundaries’[1], we need to embed cultural competence in teaching and curriculum. This year's colloquium explores issues and solutions in meeting this challenge. We will partner with industry representatives and national thought leaders to discuss the topic, and share insights from Sydney staff and students. Join us to explore what cultural competence means for you. How might we assess and give feedback on students' cultural competence? How do we develop cultural competence in our research students and research spaces? What do the professions really want from our graduates? And what do we bring to the table in terms of our own identities and experiences?

The colloquium builds on the aims and work of the university’s National Centre for Cultural Competence and the Wingara Mura – Bunga Barrabugu (‘thinking path to make tomorrow’) Strategy, and recognises that many staff have been researching and doing curriculum work in this space for some time. Cultural Competence is strongly featured in the Developing a distinctive undergraduate education discussion paper, released in June.

Call for Proposals

Staff presentations are a key element of the colloquium, and we welcome a range of proposal types across all domains of university learning (undergraduate, postgraduate coursework and research higher degrees) that address any one of the themes below:

1. Embedding cultural competence in teaching and curriculum
2. Assessing and giving feedback on students' cultural competence
3. Learning in culturally diverse groups - Knowing ourselves, knowing our students
4. Developing cultural competence in our research, and our research students
5. Work-integrated and service-learning for cultural competence

To find out more about submitting a proposal, please visit the Colloquium website

All proposals are due by 11.59pm on Friday 4 September.
 

[1] Developing a distinctive undergraduate education discussion paper, p.12

Dr Tim Soutphommasane is Australia's Race Discrimination Commissioner and commenced his five-year appointment on 20 August 2013. Prior to joining the Australian Human Rights Commission, he was a political philosopher and held posts at The University of Sydney and Monash University. His thinking on multiculturalism, national identity and patriotism has been influential in shaping debates in Australia and Britain.

Dr Soutphommasane is the author of four books, I’m not racist but … (2015), The Virtuous Citizen (2012), Don't Go Back To Where You Came From (2012), and Reclaiming Patriotism (2009). He was co-editor (with Nick Dyrenfurth) of All That's Left (2010). He has been an opinion columnist with The Age and The Weekend Australian newspapers, and in 2013 presented the documentary series Mongrel Nation on ABC Radio National.

A first-generation Australian, Dr Soutphommasane was raised in southwest Sydney. He completed a Doctor of Philosophy and Master of Philosophy (with distinction) at the University of Oxford, and is a first-class honours graduate of The University of Sydney.

For those interested in the correct pronunciation of Dr Soutphommasane’s surname, the phonetic spelling of it is Soot-pom-ma-sarn.

For more about the Sydney Teaching Colloquium visit the website