This month’s issue celebrates global connections in learning and teaching. As Professor James Smith highlighted in an earlier blog post on Internationalisation and Teaching, University of Edinburgh is one of the most international universities in the world. Previous blog posts have highlighted international collaborations with Shanghai College of Fashion, partnerships with African scholars in the MasterCard Foundation Scholar programme, and the impact of the MSc in Surgical Sciences for Malawi professionals.
In our last issue, Student author only, students seemed to really appreciate, and enjoy, the task of writing for a University blog about their experiences of learning and teaching. Rather than a token exercise, we see last month’s contributions as a launch pad to celebrate student voices in learning and teaching in every issue. And we start this month with a post written by student Dasha Selivanova, which highlights students’ experience of the recent Global Challenges in Business poster award ceremony. Other posts this month will include:
- A description of an online teaching workshop for Syrian academics in Turkey, by Jen Ross.
- An update on the MasterCard Foundation programme, by Pete Kingsley.
- A celebration of the Zhejiang University-University of Edinburgh Institute partnership, which won the Education Institutional Partnership award for 2018 at the British Business awards, by Mike Shipston.
With a nod to the close of the year, we will end this issue with a look back at the last 12 months of the Teaching Matters blog, in our Top Ten Blog Posts of 2018 feature: what were the most read blog posts of 2018??
Mini-series
The Lecture Recording Programme has been working with the Teaching Matters team over the past three months to deliver and co-edit a mini-series about lecture recording on the Teaching Matters blog. The mini-series was designed to provide a snapshot of lecture recording at Edinburgh, and present a range of perspectives and experiences. In addition to updates from members of the Lecture Recording Programme team, we engaged with the principal investigator on the University-wide lecture recording evaluation as well as lecture recording PTAS grant holders. The Chairs of the lecture recording Academic User Group and the Engagement and Evaluation Group submitted posts exploring the pedagogic impact of lecture recording and the opportunities emerging from the evaluation work that’s taking place. We also shared the views of students who are using lecture recording in their learning. The mini-series provides a rich archive of Edinburgh’s lecture recording approach to date.
We look forward to working in partnership again in the New Year on the delivery of a lecture recording podcast series and to hosting a debate on the subject ‘what is a lecture?’ as part of the 2019 Learning and Teaching Conference.
Finally, the next mini-series will focus on Sustainability and will run in January and February. It will be co-edited with colleagues from the Department for Social Responsibility and Sustainability.
Happy festive reading, and enjoy your well-earned Christmas breaks!
