Author: Jenny Medland, Student Experience Office, Faculty of Humanities & Social Sciences
What attributes should a graduate leave the University of Bath with? How can we respond to the challenges Brexit or changes to A-levels pose to student recruitment, or to the opportunities of the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF)? How can we integrate effective and efficient technologies for learning? These are the type of questions the new Centre for Learning and Teaching (CLT) will be looking at, and at this AUA event its Academic Director Professor Andrew Heath outlined its remit and initial plans.
The session began by establishing the CLT’s role in securing the future success of the University of Bath: a strong learning experience supports student satisfaction, student satisfaction aids recruitment of strong students, robust recruitment protects the University’s income and elite reputation. The changing nature of the HE landscape – with Brexit, TEF, and general economic uncertainty to name but a few challenges – makes it particularly important that Bath can respond proactively and capitalise on potential opportunities. The CLT will help equip Bath to meet these changes by ensuring the highest levels of learning and teaching across the institution.
More practically, to achieve its aims the CLT will provide proactive support for key learning and teaching activities such as TEF, and work more widely on the development and improvement of learning experience provide by Bath. There are four main areas within the centre:
- Academic Staff Development
- Technology Enhanced Learning
- Student Engagement
- Curriculum Development
In a fifty minute session Andrew could only provide a brief overview of his priorities for each area, but it gave a useful insight into plans. Academic Staff Development will be focusing on increasing the number of staff across the institution with formal teaching qualifications, an area of increasing importance as this will be publically available and will most likely be reported in league tables in the future. Technology Enhanced Learning will be delivering on a University-wide strategy ensuring that development activities and technological investment are effective and aligned with strategic priorities. Student Engagement will be identifying opportunities for students to actively contribute to the development of their programmes. And, last but not least, CLT will support Curriculum Development through working with departments to review and develop their programmes through TraCA (Transforming Curricula and Assessment), largely replacing the current degree scheme reviews. This latter work with focus particularly on aligning our curricula for both technical content and academic skills with the desired attributes for graduates on particular programmes, reducing overassessment of students and work to develop and implement more creative ways of teaching and assessing student progress.
The CLT will aim to work in close partnership with academic departments and other services, providing coordinated central support and guidance whilst still ensuring departments have ownership of their programmes, curriculum, and academic priorities. You can find out more through their website: http://www.bath.ac.uk/learningandteaching/about/index.html
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