UWL Teaching Excellence Awards 2023  The Teaching Excellence Awards recognise the positive impact of individuals and teams who teach or support learning at UWL, celebrating their success and providing a platform to share the learning from their practice. The individual awards will be £750 and teams will be awarded £1000 (to be divided by its group members)*.  *Note: The award is to be used for professional development only     Award categories  We particularly welcome nominations in the following categories:   Early Teaching Career Award – Academic staf ..read more

Dear Colleagues, The ExPERT Academy is running a series of online workshops to help prepare you for the new academic year, including for our move to the new Blackboard Ultra Base Navigation. Please make note of the date, time and link of the workshops you wish to attend. When entering the room, ensure you write your full name and school initials e.g. John Smith LCM. All workshop information is available on the below webpage, please ensure you check this regularly for updates: https://campuspress.uwl.ac.uk/teaching/workshops/ Kind regards The ExPERT Academy ..read more

by Dennis Olsen, London School of Film, Media and Design In 2019, I conducted some research on the impact of camera angles in learning videos on students’ perception of teaching excellence and student engagement. While the research focused on pre-recorded learning videos for virtual learning environments, I am confident that the findings can also be applied to online teaching with live video communication and thus might be useful for colleagues. Accordingly, to improve students’ experience over the coming weeks, the following should be considered: Although presenter-centred video co ..read more

We understand how difficult it is for you to move to teaching online so quickly. The ExPERT Academy will be sending you every week some resources aiming to help you with this new task. Today we send you few tips and a great short course from Linkedin Learning, which hopefully will give you further help with online teaching. Three tips Less is more – you don’t need to provide dozens of resources every week to your students. Resources are great, but they are only great learning opportunities when they are part of a learning activity. Two or three activities per week that are aligned to the lear ..read more

Dear Colleagues, The ExPERT Academy is developing further learning resources and support for all staff with suggestions and recommendations of how to design and deliver online learning and teaching. Learning resources will be made available as part of a blog post to be sent via the Teaching Hub once a week and through thematic live webinars which staff can attend. The first blog post will be sent on Monday, the 23rd. You will need to subscribe the Teaching Hub in order to receive these announcements. Please do this by including your e-mail address on the right navigation menu on the Teaching H ..read more

Dear colleagues, New guidance has been made available in the Teaching Hub regarding Blackboard Collaborate. Please check the link below regularly for updates on guidance for staff and students. Link: https://campuspress.uwl.ac.uk/teaching/online-teaching-toolkit/ A student guide on how to access Blackboard Collaborate (Webinar) sessions, is available for Download.   ..read more

Dear colleague, New guidance has been made available in the Teaching Hub about learning and assessing your students remotely. Please take into consideration how you are planning your assessments and how you are ensuring that learning materials and learning activities are made available to students in the eventuality that they need to learn online. Guidance and further information are available in this link: https://campuspress.uwl.ac.uk/teaching/teaching-and-assessing-remotely. The ExPERT Academy is delivering two lunchtime workshops targeting academic staff next week where we will cover the d ..read more

At the turn of a new decade, employability looks set to remain a central, if contested, topic in higher education policy and practice. In an unprecedented period of intensive academic discussion and policy development around teaching excellence and graduate outcomes, employability is a key concept in differentiating the value of higher education in supporting graduates to succeed and flourish in the labour market and beyond. In the face of this complex and fast-changing picture, we are delighted to curate Enhancing Graduate Employability: a case study compendium – a collection of case stu ..read more

The University has a KPI in its new strategy that requires all academic staff to have recognition through the UKPSF by 2023. Existing teaching qualifications that do not provide recognition by Advance HE are no longer considered sufficient.   We support colleagues who wish to apply for Associate Fellow, Fellow, Senior Fellow or Principal Fellow of the HEA via Advance UWL, our recognition scheme for teaching and learning support practitioners. Click on the above link to find out more about Advance UWL, and if you are eligible.   We are runn ..read more

Dear Colleagues, After months of continuous work, we are delighted to officially announce the launch of the Student Attainment Project (SAP2) page. You can find more information in the Teaching Hub. Our goal is to provide to our colleagues and visitors an easier way of learning about SAP2 and its outcomes. We encourage everyone to visit the SAP2 website, which aims to raise awareness about degree attainment gaps in Higher Education (HE) and provide resources to support the HE sector to engage with and address some of the potential barriers to student success. A plethora of lessons learnt from ..read more