Good Practice Blog

I have lots of people who seem to know Americans on Facebook or at least care about their Thanksgiving. Given that many of my friends are Canadians and given the proximity of the two countries, perhaps it is not that surprising (click here for a rather funny blog post on the different approaches Canadians and [...]

I wanted to start off the idea of feeling backwards in learning and then move on from there to support. Sometimes we learn the most from our hardest experiences. I look back on my university education and feel pretty good about it because it ended well I suppose. That does not mean it was always [...]

I went to a presentation on the Sheffield Graduate concept today. It’s an idea that perhaps needs to be repeated to students and us staff over and over again - as they are doing - before it truly becomes embedded in everyday consciousness and affects how we do things. That’s why I went to the [...]

The 2007 international edited collection “Rethinking Assessment in Higher Education: Learning for the longer term” edited by David Boud and Nancy Falchikov starts from the premise that there “is substantial evidence that  assessment, rather than teaching, has the major influence on students’  learning.”
In the first paragraph of their book they sum up the problem that [...]

I began yesterday musing upon the underlying assumptions about the Ivory Tower metaphor: that universities and those who “reside within” are somehow passive, locked away and introverted and that this is a space available to only a chosen few. Perhaps this makes sense as university education was seen, until very recently, as something that a [...]