Humanities Teaching and Learning Blog
This blog is to share good practice (things that worked for you), thoughts (ideas, inspiration, plans), learning (conference experiences, trying out new skills), and opportunities to connect (with other educators at Manchester and in other universities/contexts, students, wider communities).
Thinking, Collaborating and Growing: A reflection on attending the International Society for Music Education conferences and its impact on my own teaching practices
Ryan Humphrey (SALC) shares his reflection on attending the International Society for Music Education Conference in Helsinki
Cementing a community of learning, herbs, bag painting, spoon throwing and a silent disco
Claire McGourlay (SoSS) shares her reflections from Connections in Legal Education Fest 2024
Advance HE: Teaching and Learning Conference 2024, Nottingham Trent University, 2 July
Mark Baker, Department of History, shares his thoughts from the Advance HE: Teaching and Learning Conference 2024
Plots and storyboards: What visualising learning journeys revealed as I designed a new programme.
Sarah Dyer shares her reflections from the ‘Visualising Learning Journeys’ summer training day
Instagram: Transforming Higher Education Engagement Beyond the Classroom
Sofia Izquierdo Sanchez and William Tayler discuss how they integrate Instagram as a complementary tool to their teaching to introduce research-led teaching activities, increase student engagement, and relate teaching to students’ real lives in economics education.
Learning Design Case Studies
The Learning Design team have supported a number of units and programmes across the faculty. In this post we share some examples and feedback from academic colleagues.
Co-creating and co-delivering resources with students
Inspiring a large cohort with varying levels of understanding can be challenging. Mario Pezzino (SoSS) explains how co-creating and co-delivering alongside students boosted student engagement and trust in the syllabus.
Why we went on a spacewalk: Supporting intended learning outcomes with virtual reality (VR) in seminars
Craig Thomas (SEED) used virtual reality headsets in a seminar setting to engage students in an immersive outer space experience.
Autograder for programming assignments via Gradescope
Ekaterina Kazak (SoSS) highlights the use of automated programming assessments with Gradescope to address the challenges of manual marking and provide timely feedback to economics students.
Using Virtual Reality experiences for Psychology of Education
Sarah MacQuarrie (SEED) used Virtual reality headsets as part of a lecture based around visual perception. Students used an app called ‘Notes on Blindness’, an immersive, interactive storytelling experience which creates a cognitive and emotional experience of blindness.
Body Art, Apps and Parties: Creative Knowledge Translation
Stephanie Sodero (SALC) challenges students to distil a key point from their research essays into a creative project designed for a target audience.
Assessment As Learning: Collaborative Peer Assessment
MIE lecturer and unit lead Kelly Burgoyne (SEED) went from peer assessment sceptic to champion as she developed and supported a peer assessment as learning approach on her 3rd year UG unit.
Dual delivery of archaeology lab sessions
With the assistance of a student facilitator, Hannah Cobb (SALC) ran archaeology lab sessions simultaneously for in-person and online students. Read how they went about it, the benefits, and students’ feedback.
Why is their work better than mine? Using a showcase event to harness the power of conversation, comparative judgement, and self-generated feedback
Creating meaningful summative feedback can be time consuming, with little guarantee of student engagement. However, allowing students to display their finished work to their peers, in an event aimed to encourage dialogue and comparative judgement, can become the catalyst for the creation of, and engagement with, high-quality self-generated feedback. Case study by Alison Zimmer (AMBS)
Using an e-portfolio tool for reflection and communication in global education
Paul Armstrong and Stephen Rayner (SEED) use e-Portfolio tool PebblePad to allow space for reflection and to provide regular interaction and feedback on their international programme.
Using Matterport to create a virtual student induction
Using Matterport technology, the Humanities eLearning team, alongside Music Department colleagues, developed an online induction module for students, including a virtual tour of the Martin Harris Centre.
Better seminar participation through annotation exercises
Noelle Dückmann Gallagher (SALC) describes how she uses annotation exercises to increase student participation in seminars.
Engaging students with innovative group assessment creating academic posters
Cornelia Lawson & Philip Shapira (AMBS) asked students to prepare academic posters for a group assignment.
The benefits of regular formative Blackboard quizzes
Panos Sarantopoulos (AMBS) shares how using Blackboard quizzes regularly, alongside forums and drop-in sessions, enhances learning.
Developing Student assessment literacy though Peer assessment
Anonymous peer to peer review, even without students commenting on each other’s work is an effective way of developing skills such as writing style and structure in essay writing. Jenni Rose (AMBS) shares how students can also gain confidence in themselves from this process and become connected independent learners.