Teaching and Learning in Lockdown and Beyond

As restrictions ease, we are returning to the physical classroom, but with a twist for 2021, our students can expect a much more blended approach to learning.

To prepare for teaching and learning in a post-lockdown world, we held a week of CPD sessions centred on using both traditional and digital platforms to deliver a rich student experience.

Delivering rich student experiences

The theme of our summer semester Learning and Teaching CPD sessions this year was “delivering rich student experiences”, and our aim to showcase what QAHE has learned about remote learning and teaching.

It was a great chance to share ideas about how to bring this newly acquired knowledge into the next phase of teaching.

Keynote

Our keynote speaker Joy Umekwe delivered a thought-provoking session on decolonising the curriculum. She adopted a blended approach to her delivery and gave the session in two parts: a pre-recorded video and live interactive workshop.

Joy raised our awareness how problematic a colonised curriculum can be, and followed up with a discussion about how we can make our curriculum more inclusive.

New digital approaches

Post-lockdown, our students have new expectations: these include a robust online offering allowing for asynchronous as well as synchronous learning.

To help us maximise our use of the technology to meet these needs, we had informative and practical sessions on using video content and its alternatives (Sean O’Grady, L&T), and how to get the most out of our VLEs (David Juhasz, L&T).

Lessons learned

Teaching remotely has had a big impact on how we interact with our students. Luckily to keep us up to speed with an insight into the student perspective we had great sessions on The Student Voice (Jo Dennison, ACE Team) and If you love your students, don’t make them search in the wrong places (Ihar Ivanou, Library)

These discussions really helped us to take stock and note how we can better place the learner at the centre of our teaching.

Gearing up

Building on “lessons learned”, we had a number of speakers helping us to look forward to how we deliver using a blended model.

These included sessions on differentiating for students with different needs (Renee Rowlands & Karen FlowersMatini), creating engaging sessions (Jay Rahman), and encouraging independence and peer-work (Ioanna Charchanti).These sessions were all practical and stimulating, and were a great way to look forward to a “new normal” of learning and teaching online and in-person.

You can watch the recordings of the sessions and read more about the CPD days here.