HEA Accreditation get-togethers… A1

Let me first say: apologies to all readers who this really doesn’t apply to. Because this is only tangentially tactileacademia related, and some of the lingo is probably very Staffs specific…

Part of the university plan at Staffordshire University is that everybody should be HEA accredited within 5 years, so a small group of people from my award group have decided to get together regularly to have a chat about the things we need to for our individual portfolios. As inevitably not everybody can make it to these sessions, I promised to put a short summary on this blog, which also will allow exchange of ideas. I will put them into a new category called ‘HEA accreditation’. Who knows, maybe we will even get some virtual group members from other universities…?

So today we focused on Area of Activity 1: Design and plan learning activities and/or programmes of study

This seemed really straight-forward. For our portfolio we need at least one piece of evidence that shows we design and plan learning activities. Suggested on the tick-list for Fellow were:

• module handbook developed by you
• session plan
• evidence of involvement in a validation panel
• learning resource pack
• plans to integrate the Staffordshire Graduate attributes

Suggested on the tick-list for Senior Fellow were:

• Award or module handbook developed by you
• Award monitoring form completed by you
• Evidence of driving forward the Staffordshire Graduate agenda within your area

In our discussion we wondered how old the evidence could be. Some of us have recently had a significant change in our module leadership duties due to a restructuring on the awards, so things have changed quite a bit. We figured that as long as not all the evidence was ancient it would probably be ok to put in something that showed good practice but wasn’t current at the moment – and obviously that could be mentioned as part of the annotation/overview.

We decided to all think about examples we could include in our portfolio (to be edited down at a later stage), and to bring them to the next session, so that we could use these get-togethers to share good practice as well as just put together our own portfolios.

Next session: A2: Teach and/or support learning (moved from 12 to 1)