In this post, Jenny Scoles introduces the January and February Learning & Teaching Enhancement Theme: Online/hybrid enhancements in teaching practice.
Happy New Year to all our readers! We welcome you back from what was hopefully a restful and well-deserved break over Christmas with our first theme Learning & Teaching Enhancement Theme of 2022: Online/hybrid enhancements in teaching practice. As we enter into our third year of managing day-to-day with the impacts of Covid, online and hybrid teaching practices have become the mainstay of many university courses. In this theme, Teaching Matters aims to highlight some teaching practices that have been enhanced with the unplanned move to online/hybrid delivery.
Teaching Matters has already featured numerous posts where this is the case, for example, Dr Dani Orejon’s account of the Adaptation of the Chemical Engineering Laboratory 3 to online and hybrid teaching, Brian Mather and Dr Neil Anderson’s opportunistic experience of using gaming to teach veterinary studies, and Dr Margaret MacDougall and Sophia Wong Ching Hwai’s vision to build an online student-staff partnership with per-session feedback.
The main difference in this theme is that, as time passes, examples of work are now being officially documented as ‘positive practice for sharing across the University’ by School Annual Quality Reports (2020-21), which are reviewed by a Sub Group and presented to the Senate Quality Assurance Committee. Many of the posts featured in this issue have been identified in these reports as ‘positive practice’, and Teaching Matters has invited those involved to write a blog post to share these examples.
Blog posts in this theme will be published every Thursday. In January and February, there will not be a ‘Hot Topic’ theme (normally published on Tuesdays), but we will continue to publish podcast episodes on Wednesdays, and any extra posts on Mondays.
On the note of sharing positive practice, please also consider submitting a proposal to the 2022 Learning and Teaching Conference, to be held 14-16 June. You can find out more about the conference, and how to submit a proposal, on the conference website.
Finally, don’t forget to check out the Top Ten Teaching Matters posts of 2021!
Happy reading!
Jenny Scoles
Dr Jenny Scoles is the editor of Teaching Matters. She is an Academic Developer (Learning and Teaching Enhancement), and a Senior Fellow HEA, in the Institute for Academic Development, and provides pedagogical support for University course and programme design. Her interests include student engagement, professional learning and sociomaterial methodologies.
