"The Teaching and Learning Unit (TLU) and AnSEO - The Student Engagement Office are delighted launched our annual Combined Funding Call to support staff and students who wish to undertake short term projects related to teaching, learning, assessment and student engagement (TLASE) activities. This funding call enables teams of staff and/or students, to develop ideas that might enhance teaching, learning, assessment and student engagement across the student life cycle. The purpose of this session was to provide more information about the funding process itself, describe what supports are available and provide participants with an opportunity to hear from previous recipients in terms of what they achieved and how they felt about the experience and the impact these projects have on staff and students."

"The Teaching and Learning Unit (TLU) and AnSEO - The Student Engagement Office are delighted launched our annual Combined Funding Call to support staff and students who wish to undertake short term projects related to teaching, learning, assessment and student engagement (TLASE) activities. This funding call enables teams of staff and/or students, to develop ideas that might enhance teaching, learning, assessment and student engagement across the student life cycle. The purpose of this session was to provide more information about the funding process itself, describe what supports are available and provide participants with an opportunity to hear from previous recipients in terms of what they achieved and how they felt about the experience and the impact these projects have on staff and students."

The project is concerned with opening the institutional dialogue about the benefits of adopting the principles of Universal Design for Learning in our practice.

"The Teaching and Learning Unit (TLU) and AnSEO - The Student Engagement Office are delighted to announce our annual Combined Funding Call to support staff and students who wish to undertake short term projects related to teaching, learning, assessment and student engagement (TLASE) activities. This funding call enables teams, of staff and/or students, to develop ideas that might enhance teaching, learning, assessment and student engagement across the student life cycle. The purpose of this session was to provide more information about the funding process itself, describe what supports are available and provide participants with an opportunity to hear from previous recipients in terms of what they achieved and how they felt about the experience and the impact these projects have had on staff and students."

"The Teaching and Learning Unit (TLU) and AnSEO - The Student Engagement Office are delighted to announce our annual Combined Funding Call to support staff and students who wish to undertake short term projects related to teaching, learning, assessment and student engagement (TLASE) activities. This funding call enables teams, of staff and/or students, to develop ideas that might enhance teaching, learning, assessment and student engagement across the student life cycle. The purpose of this session was to provide more information about the funding process itself, describe what supports are available and provide participants with an opportunity to hear from previous recipients in terms of what they achieved and how they felt about the experience and the impact these projects have had on staff and students."

In this seminar, we outlined the principles of UDL focusing on the why, how and what of learning. We shared with you our experiences of completing the National Forum for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education’s (NFETLHE’s) UDL Digital Badge which we completed during the 2020-21 academic year. We provided an insight into what was involved and how it has impacted our thinking and practice in MTU.

"BALI - Building Assessment Literacy Initiative - is a project to develop a suite of resources to support students and staff in the growth of competencies and capabilities in Assessment Literacy (AL). It aims to bring an interdisciplinary approach to the co-creation of these resources, with student-staff partnership at its core. In this session, participants heard about the most recent outcomes of the BALI project, where 3 teams comprised of a mix of staff and students co-created assessment and feedback resources in a partnership-based approach. We got a peek under the bonnet of the partnership-based approach hearing from both the staff and student’s perspective."

"Miles Davis, musical creator extraordinaire, once asserted that sometimes it takes a long time to play like yourself. The 21st century’s complexity and uncertainty requires unprecedented cognitive, affective and operative flexibility, inquiry and creativity. As educators, we are for a short, albeit significant, time company on our students’ developmental journeys. We must be acutely aware of the increasing demands on our students to acquire the competence, capacity and capability to develop authentic life plans – to play like themselves - if our curricula are to support students meet the demands of the curriculum of life (Robert Kegan). The significant challenges for our students are thus challenges of the Self (awareness of values, deepest beliefs and purposes). To be good company on our students’ journeys educators should engage students qua persons; immersing them in teaching and learning environments that challenge and support such Self-development. Accordingly, educators must disrupt ourselves (Randy Bass), embedding an ontological dimension to our curricula so that we cultivate within our students the competence, capacity and capability to live life as inquiry. Scaffolding such reflective practice requires the cultivation of space for students to explore how (for instance) disciplinary understanding is shaping who they are becoming as they transition through formal education in preparation for transition out to (primarily) professional environments. As educators we hold a key to these existentialist doors through how encounters with curricula are designed. If an overarching purpose of Higher Education is framed as the cultivation of intentional learning capacity embodying ‘assessment as learning’ then educators must scaffold students to unlock these existential doors. This may be psychologically and developmentally difficult, but it is perhaps an imperative if students qua graduates are to successfully engage with the unknown, unknowns and unknown knowns of the 21st century. In this workshop, the facilitator shared his own experiments embedding reflective practice into his curricula. He sharde his experiences in designing, implementing and assessing student-centred reflective assessment performances (for example Critical Incident Analysis; Immunity to Change Maps; Picturing Your Future Self Diagrams; Transformative Learning Videos and Lived Experience Portfolios) that explicitly integrate knowing, doing and being; an integration of epistemology with ontology. The aims of this workshop were, to: Justify the concept of reflective practice as a key part of a student-centred curriculum Offer a rationale for reflective practice as a core component of assessment as learning Outline how to embed reflective practice into the curriculum Construct different ways of designing, implementing and assessing student-centred reflective assessment performances The through line of this workshop was to plant (or re-enforce) the seed that we qua educators ought to privilege our role as mentors enabling our students to sing their own ‘developmental’ songs, giving them the courage, to quote Miles Davis again, to don’t play what is there, play what is not there."

In June 2021, a project entitled “UDL@MTU – Towards Embedding UDL Practices and Principles at MTU” received funding under MTU’s allocation of the Strategic Alignment of Teaching & Learning Enhancement Fund 2020. As part of this project, in semester 1 of the 2021/22 academic year, a local MTU iteration of the National Forum for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education’s (NFETLHE) Digital Badge “Universal Design in Teaching and Learning” was rolled out with twelve colleagues participating from across MTU. In order to complete the badge, participants learnt about Universal Design for Learning (UDL), reflected on their own practice and redesigned some aspects of a teaching activity they were delivering in line with the principles of UDL. They then had to implement and deliver the redesigned activity, collect some feedback from students in terms of their experience of the redesigned activity and submit a short ‘Redesign Activity Report’. Catherine O’Mahony, a lecturer in Tourism in Hospitality, was one of the twelve MTU badge participants.