"AdvanceHE is the new name for the UK Higher Education Academy, formed by its merger with the Leadership Foundation and the Equalities Challenge Unit, and this session was aimed at helping participants considering submitting an application to AdvanceHE for Associate Fellowship, Fellowship, Senior Fellowship or Principal Fellowship, depending on role, experience and the participants personal track record. This participative workshop was designed to: Explain the application process; Help participants decide which category was best for them; Explain what is meant by Areas of Activity, Core Knowledge and Professional Values, all of which participants would need to evidence in their submission; Help participants start drafting at least part of their application; Clarify where the UK scheme fits alongside the emergent Irish National Professional Development Framework."

" “It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.” (Aristotle) According to a recent study by the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI), funded by the Health and Safety Authority, the instances of work-related stress amongst employees in Ireland has doubled between 2010 and 2015. Work-Related Stress (WRS) is stress caused or made worse by work. It simply refers to when a person perceives the work environment in such a way that his or her reaction involves feelings of an inability to cope. ‘Stress occurs when an individual perceives an imbalance between the demands placed on them on the one hand, and their ability to cope on the other. It often occurs in situations characterised by low levels of control and support.’ (Professor Tom Cox, I-WHO, University of Nottingham, UK). As we all know, higher education can be a particularly stressful environment for both staff and students due to a variety of competing demands and deadlines at various stages during the academic year, many of which are beyond their control. Rather than just focusing on students, this workshop was all about staff and helping them survive! It aimed to provide participants with some suggestions to help reduce, or at least manage, some of the causes and effects of stress and hopefully help participants to take control of their workload and stress levels. Participants who attended this workshop: Identified strategies that could be utilised to better manage their workload Became more aware of the signs and symptoms of stress Identified some useful strategies to help deal with stress Examined the value of feedback on lectures and the importance of reflecting on one’s teaching for one’s own professional development Discussed some of the shared challenges faced in higher education today and potential solutions"

Reflective practice is a key skill in many professions including education. but is particularly relevant to students in the context of work placement. We as educators expect students embarking on work placement to have, at some point in their studies, developed sufficient reflection skills to enable them effectively capture their learning from the placement experience. However, this is not always the case as students often receive little explicit instruction, practice or guidance about how to reflect. In this seminar participants will be guided through the process of reflection and engage in reflective practices. There will be opportunities for discussion in breakout rooms. Discussions will cover how other colleagues are engaging students on reflection in placement settings. Expect to be busy at this workshop with reading, discussion, shared practice and maybe even some drawing.

"For many of us, we start our teaching careers in higher education being ‘thrown in at the deep end’ being almost immediately immersed in preparing and delivering lectures, creating assessments, running laboratories and tutorials, marking student’s work, etc., without having had the opportunity to learn how to tackle such challenges. While a huge amount of research exists on teaching, learning, assessment and feedback, very few of us, especially in the first weeks of teaching, have the time or energy to invest in getting familiar with this research. The aim of this resource to present some of the most useful and relevant tips, ideas and tactics from the literature to help you cope well with those first few critical elements of your work in teaching in higher education. This resource is based on a resource developed by Prof Phil Race at Leeds Beckett University in 2006, which was subsequently made available as an Open Educational Resource through Creative Commons, and has been revised for Munster Technological University (MTU), with support and guidance from Marese Bermingham (Head, AnSEO – The Student Engagement Office; Head, Teaching and Learning Unit; Head, Arts Office) of MTU Cork Campuses and Prof Sally Brown, Emerita Professor, Leeds Beckett University, Visiting Professor at University of Plymouth, Liverpool John Moores University, Edge Hill University and University of South Wales"

Are you involved in new programme development and about to starting to create new modules? Or are involved in programmatic review and revising some existing modules? If so, the following is a Universal Design for Learning (UDL) Module Guide developed by our colleague Ann Toebes, Curriculum Development Facilitator, provides suggestions for how UDL can be embedded in the curriculum via the module descriptor.

Assessment approaches methods and practices vary worldwide and sometimes students studying in Ireland find our systems confusing/incomprehensible and puzzling. For example, not all nations express what is expected of students in terms of learning outcomes and the provision of transparent assessment criteria is not always undertaken. For this reason, some international students may struggle to understand how marks are derived and how they match up to the criteria we provide in programme documentation. This guide is designed to help assessors clarify key assessment issues for our students and provide some practical tips on how we can support theirunderstanding.

When we present students with unfamiliar assessment formats, it can be difficult for them to work out what is expected of them and more difficult on occasions for them to recognise what kind of work is good enough to match required standards. If we are able to show rather than just tell them what we are looking for, they are more likely to achieve higher standards. Exemplars are a well-established means of helping students get the hang of new-to-them assessment genres and can save a lot of anguish on both sides.

Students, especially those from diverse cultural backgrounds, often find the first assignment on a course really challenging, particularly if they are ‘first in family’ to go to university and may therefore have a limited understanding of what is likely to be expected of them. It therefore pays dividends if staff put resources and energy into helping students get to know the rules of the game. Students may be able to successfully manage the unfamiliarity of new learning contexts and classroom environments that are very different to what they have experienced before. However, they can’t avoid the need to be successful in assessment if they are to progress. It’s part of our job therefore to help students overcome any uneasiness, and the best way to do this is to demystify the process and give them stress-free opportunities to practice the competencies they eventually need to demonstrate to meet the learning outcomes

Many authors (including Nicol, 2010 and Carless, 2013) suggest that good feedback should always be a dialogue, not a monologue from tutors. Students can become very good at self-assessing their work, but usually don’t have the opportunity to fine-tune their self-assessment and need feedback to help them on their way. If we just ask: ‘try to work out what your mark or grade is?’ they’re likelyvto just guess, and then probably forget what they guessed. While some students might select a grade close to that which you gave them, studies show that ‘high achievers’ underestimate their abilities and the majority of under-achievers will overestimate their mark. Research shows (Clouder, Broughan, Jewell & Steventon, 2012) that this trend is retained across different nationalities but interestingly, students form different nationalities can also have different perspectives of their abilities. Therefore, we need to educate students about making assessment judgements against well-expressed criteria, just as we try to do when we assess their work.

When they are clearly focused, well-crafted essay topics allow students to demonstrate how well they can access and manage information in meaningful ways” (Morgan, Dunn, Parry, & O’Reilly, 2004, p. 111) but many argue that writing essays isn’t the best preparation for functioning effectively in the 21st century, when oral presentation and working well with others may be more important considerations. However, others argue that essays can allow students to show their creativity and skills at writing an argument or making a case. Whichever is the case, there are five main problems with the over-use of essays as an assessment device: • They take a great deal of time to mark, let alone the time it takes for students to prepare, draft and compose them. • When most assessment is in the form of essays, students’ skills at essay-writing are repeatedly tested, at the expense sometimes of their understanding of the subject. • Lots of research shows that we’re not at all good at marking essays fairly – different assessors often give the same essay very different marks. • Essay marks often tend to lie between 35% for a poor one and 75% for a very good one, whereas in many other disciplines the marks for an assignment like a lab report can range across the whole 0-100% span more evenly. • With coursework essays, there can be doubt about veracity – i.e. whodunit?! (Race, 2014) Of course, essay questions in exams largely get over the last of the above problems but assessing them often relies heavily on how effective students are at writing legibly and fast, which can have little to do with their grasp of the subject matter.

Written exams have developed into one of the most common forms of assessment all the way from second-level to third-level and beyond, but while they have benefits, they also have downsides. Many argue that they’re good regarding ‘veracity’ (we are reasonably sure that what is assessed is the work of the candidate), they are relatively economical to conduct and manage, and they are fair since each candidate has the same opportunities. It’s also true that many employers regard exam results as easy to use when selecting candidates for interview. Traditionalists argue that performing under the time constrained pressure of exams provides a good indicator of vital strengths of candidates. However, they remain a snapshot of what a andidate can do at a set time, over a limited defined timescale, at a particular place, and attempting specific defined questions and factors such as legibility and speed of handwriting are known to influence marks.

Nowadays it is widely recognised that giving developmental and formative feedback on student assignments is among the most important of the many ways in which we interact with learners, but doing so takes a great deal of academic time, effort and resource, particularly when cohort sizes increase more rapidly than staff-time deployment on assessment.

We are often keen to encourage students to submit assignments in advance of their final submissions, but we need to be able to do this efficiently and effectively, since few of us have the time to provide detailed comments on drafts provided by lots of our students. The ideas set out here are designed to illustrate how we can help our students to improve their work-in-progress without making unfeasible amounts of work for the hard-pressed markers

Assessors complain that they spend hours devising and delivering good feedback via comments on assessed work, in class, in studio critiques, on the Virtual Learning Environment (VLE), in one-to-ones and in tutorials, only to find that students seem to either ignore the formative comments or complain they never get any feedback. If students ignore or trivialise our feedback, it cannot help them however detailed and supportive it is. Students’ failure to engage with feedback not only is unhelpful to them and frustrating for us, but also impacts negatively on Irish Survey of Student Engagement (ISSE) scores.

Students put great store by the comments we put on their work. They often come to higher education with high expectations about the nature and value of teacher comments, and look to them to provide them with authoritative guidance on their learning and performance. Where that provision is found wanting, unhelpful or unconstructive, students rapidly become disenchanted, disappointed and alienated.