Developing online tutorials at Teaching and Assessment Network

There are the slides and audio of my Teaching and Assessment Network seminar that I did on 25 March at the University of Leicester. Just putting them here really to kick off this blog as it's Friday afternoon and can't summon up much more energy!

Development of online resources to help students develop their academic skills from Stuart Johnson

Careers after biological sciences

Here's a brilliant new video from Chris Willmott in Biological Sciecnes on studying medicine after biological sciences. Chris has developed a raft of resources including videos and presentations for bioscience students. He gets alumni to come and present to students on different careers. Areas covered so far are:

• Clinical Trials
• Conservation
• Cosmetics
• Forensics
• Formulation technologist
• Healthcare Science
• Journalism
• Manufacturing Scientist
• Medicine
• Microbiology
• Pharmaceutical Industry
• Recruitment
• Teaching

More info can be found at http://biosciencecareers.wordpress.com/ I've also linked it to the blog roll.

Academic writing

I was teaching academic writing to computer science students again last week. The session went ok but I can't help feeling it could be much better. My experince resonated with much of what we have discussed in our sharing practice meetings about teaching writing. I had a quite a few exercises, most of which were specific to the discipline - but it always seems hard going doing this for 40+ students. Has anyone tried any activites recently that worked well? One that worked quite well for me was getting them to paraphrase some short articles my summarising them verbally to a partner. And what can we link them to online so they can do more exercises in the lecture. And will that work? Lots of questions!

Web resources project

A few of us met today to begin a project to improve and expand our web resources. Currently our resources are organised under study areas (which we plan to stick too) but we do have a lot of long lists. I'd been thinking that something a bit more like the BBS Skillswise site might be good - which would help us both organise our material and offer students options as to how they interact with it (study guides, activities, quizzes or checklists). We've agreed this is a good idea - now we just need to get on and do it! We also agreed that we need to audit what resources we have for specific groups of students so we can see if we can differentiate the resources we have for different groups.  We're also going to give the resources creative commons licenses. The next stage is to decide which study areas to tackle first and what kind of resource types we want to produce. All ideas welcome!

David Allen on Getting Things Done

A bit long but useful (45 minutes) but useful background at least to the Getting Things Done method.