A platform for staff, students, alumni and guests to share practices and debate ideas
Yesterday the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) published a report that argues that in our quickly changing modern world, education cannot prepare for the future using only lessons of the past.
It highlights global mega-trends and how they will influence higher education.
For the full report please click here.
This term’s theme for the Big Conversation is Digital Education. Over the next ten weeks, you will have the opportunity to discuss and reflect on a range of articles around the Digital Education debate. This takes us to the inaugural HEFi conference on the 29th June at which the Birmingham Digital Education team within HEFi will … Continue reading “The Digital Education Debate – by Jane James (HEFi)”
There is a divide in the academic world between those for whom equations and mathematical expressions are their primary tools, and everyone else! Pure and applied mathematicians, computer scientists, physicists and many computational biologists (for the purposes of this blog post I will refer to all of us as mathematicians for short) typically find that … Continue reading “Accessible equations – by Dave Smith, School of Mathematics”
Chris Millward has been appointed as the new ‘Director for Fair Access and Participation’ at the Office for Students (OfS). He is visiting our University later this week, and I wondered whether staff or students had any questions that I might put to him on your behalf? The OfS is positioned as a regulator with considerable … Continue reading “Do you have any questions for Chris Millward, the new Director for Fair Access and Participation’ at the Office for Students? (by Kathy Armour)”
Birmingham Digital, I think, is rightly a major theme of this round of the Big Conversation. In a previous piece I outlined a healthy scepticism about the use of technology in Higher Education. In this post, I consider a particular digital issue – the use of ‘teaching films’ in distance- and blended-learning programmes. We … Continue reading “The use of Teaching Films in blended and distance learning: Is good engagement good learning? By Tom Harrison”
Dear Colleagues I look forward to discussing the issues around ‘research-led’ teaching and learning at the Teaching Academy Conference on the 4th July. I am planning to launch a series of conversations on this topic in the autumn – so please feel free to start blogging as a follow up to the Teaching Academy session. … Continue reading “Research-led/intensive/informed-teaching/learning etc… By Kathy Armour”
At the School Away Day today, Prof. Kathy Armour spoke of the challenge made at a recent meeting by a banking executive for the University to change in order to address the expectations of Generation Z with regard specifically to choice and involvement. This prompted the thought: How do businesses engage in training? Indeed, how … Continue reading “Intensive courses as learning models (Hugh Houghton, CAL)”
The Liberal Arts and Natural Sciences (LANS) message is simple: come to Birmingham, where our research breadth becomes your learning depth. But one of the hardest things to characterise and quantify is where the points of intersection between academic and undergraduate research lie. Research is exciting and challenging because it requires the identification of original, significant, messy questions, and … Continue reading “Liberal Arts and Natural Sciences: The Way Forward? (Diana Spencer and the LANS team)”
At one of our Big Conversation events, we picked out some areas which at Birmingham we think are important to the student experience and asked our students whether that rings true for them. One topic that really got people talking was research-led teaching. As a Birmingham alumna who took a keen interest in the research … Continue reading “Research-led teaching? (Student Discussion in CoSS – Caroline Hetherington)”
In 2026 will academia be undermined by essay mills? There is increasing worry that the growing opportunities for students to buy plagiarism-proof essays from the web will allow cheats to prosper and undermine confidence in degree classification. Concern has even reached the higher echelons, with Universities Minister Jo Johnson asking the sector to consider ways … Continue reading “Tilting at the Dark Satanic (Essay) Mills”