Phil Race

For the next version of ‘The Lecturer’s Toolkit’, Sally and I have drawn up a table of suggestions, addressing problems commonly encountered in turning pedagogic work into publications. We’ll be delighted to receive more problems and more suggestions to add to this table. Getting your pedagogic work published (697 downloads)

Now that the 3rd edition has been launched at the SEDA Conference in Newcastle last week, I’m pleased to provide a link to a short video of me talking to Rachael Plant of Sage about some of the main ideas in the book, also available on the Sage website. http://tinyurl.com/l7yddya

Rachael Plant of Sage helped me to make this very short video of suggestions for lecturers regarding large-group teaching. The following link should work, but if not you can find it on the Sage website with two other videos of me talking about making learning happen.

http://tinyurl.com/nxhohe3

‘Responding to diversity and widening participation’ which was Chapter 8 in the 2005 edition of ‘Making Learning Happen’ is not included in the new 3rd edition (2014). This  is partly because the topic of inclusive learning has grown so much, and really needs a book of its own nowadays, and partly because I expanded the discussion of assessment so much in the third edition. Therefore it was agreed that this chapter from the 2nd edition (slightly abridged) should be freely available, probably on the Sage website linked to the third edition in due course, but meanwhile on my website. MLH 2005 Ch.8 (834 downloads) .

For greater depth I am pleased to recommend ‘Towards Inclusive Learning in Higher Education: developing curricula for disabled students: Mike Adams and Sally Brown (2006), Abingdon: Routledge’, which is available as a kindle book now too.

Here are the main slides we used Nottingham (712 downloads) . Thanks for being such a great group – I look forward to seeing you two more times in the coming months – bring your friends along.

It has been a great pleasure to work with Sally and Graham Webb at the Universities of Segovia and Valladolid today. All the slides and handouts we used can be accessed from Sally’s website, at the following link:

http://sally-brown.net/2014/04/conversations-sunny-spain/

First, congratulations to St Mary’s for achieving full University status very recently. I enjoyed my visit today. Here are the main slides we used (plus the additional ones on self-assessment which I promised). St Mary's University (785 downloads) They are not necessarily in the order in which I presented them, as I dipped and dived into various presentations. (for anyone who wished for more, there’s more on Lectures in the Edinburgh post below, and more on assessment in the Plymouth post below and on the Assessment page of this website).

Here are the main slides I used in our workshop together Plymouth Pgcap (761 downloads) . You can find more detail of my thinking on essays and exams on the ‘Assessment’ page of this website. I enjoyed working with you all, and will be working on the paperwork we generated about the pass/fail criteria, which will go up on your course web pages soon, and look forward to working with you again on 3rd June.

Here are the main slides we used – thanks for being a great group. Edinburgh 2014 (711 downloads) . For regular followers, you might be interested in the set of quotes about lectures which I composed from the literature yesterday, and which appear here for the first time as slides.

Those who’ve been at my workshops will have heard me rage against the over-use of essays as an assessment device. I often say ‘we can’t mark them fairly’. Or ‘we tend to reward waffling and wordsmithing rather than depth of thought’ and so on. More important, except for exam essays, do we really know who did them? ‘Whodunit?’ is a real problem in coursework essays. Don’t blame the students – it’s our fault for using a dodgy assessment format!
And they take for ever to mark (let alone all the time to write them). It’s like the bear hunt – we can’t go over them, we can’t go under them, we’ve just got to go right through them!
I’ve tried to put some of my thoughts into words in my last two books, and am revisiting these thoughts in the forthcoming editions of these, and attach these thoughts here, in case they are helpful to you – especially if the bane of your life is marking essays (or indeed writing them!). Essays (1578 downloads)