SPS Teaching Team Award

Photo by Clem_nat reproduced by Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International

Yesterday I was delighted to hear that the Media Research Methods team had received the Teaching Team Award. This was part of the annual School of Social Sciences Learning & Teaching Awards. It recognises excellence in teaching at the University of Glasgow. I was one of 19 colleagues to get this the award (the full names are listed below).

The award committee noted:

“Team teaching is not new our school, but we have recently seen bigger and bigger teams coming together to develop core courses for our largest programmes. The challenge for team delivered courses is the ability to ensure coherence of experience for all students. This is something that the event winners of this award certainly achieved over the past year. Responsible for the largest single course in the school, the judging committee noted that the Media Research Methods team delivered an outstanding first run of a complex, large-scale course, driven by effective collaboration, care, and a shared commitment to over 460 students success”.

I would like to congratulate the rest of the team for all their hard work last year. I want to especially acknowledge Harvey and Lluis for their work convening this course. The full list of recipients is below- congratulations to all!:

Lluis de Nadal Alsina, Harvey Humphrey, Kirstie Ken English, Catriona Forrest, Catherine Happer, Isaac Hoff, Hayes Mabweazara, Ida Norberg, Galina Oustinova-Stjepanovic, Paul Reilly, Cairsti Russell, Lito Tsitsou, Erdem Avsar, Emma Flynn, Adnan Hossain, Caroline Leicht, Ashli Mullen, Yu Sun, Kenneth Ward

Awarded Senior Fellow, Higher Education Academy

Today I received notification that my application for Senior Fellowship of the Higher Education Academy had been successful. Many thanks to Lynnette Matthews for her support and invaluable feedback on my application.

#actandprotest identified as example of good teaching practice

For the past two years I have been using #actandprotest to share resources with my students on the third year undergraduate module ‘Activism and Protest in the Information Age.’ This has been identified by the Leicester Learning Institute as an example of good practice. You can find some more information on this (and a contribution from me on how to use social media in teaching) here

Screencasts in Media Studies launched

I am currently working on a project entitled ‘Screencasts in Media Studies,’ which examines the pedagogic value of using screencasts to support student learning in the Department of Media and Communication.

The project had the following intended outcomes:

1) Demonstrate the potential role of screencasts in addressing the diverse learning needs of international students in the Department.

2) Enhance the existing provision of learning resources for media and communication students

3) Empower students to take greater ownership of their learning and provide resources that aid their preparation for assessed work such as essays and examinations.

A sum of £1336.40 was awarded to the project from the University of Leicester’s Teaching Enhancement Fund in January 2013. The results of the project are expected to be published in August 2014.

Further information about the project can be found here: http://screencastsinmediastudies.wordpress.com